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I started my investigation into Blogs and Content Management Systems,
in all I installed and tried 6 and reviewed of the best known ones.
Over a 3 week period I worked on these full time, 10 hours a day 6.5
days a week, I installed one CMS / Blog after another, tested, filled with content, added photos and reviewed all the features.
In the end it came down to Joomla Vs ....
To start with I made a "shopping list" of essentials that I decided that I would need from my website, then I went about looking at all the CMS and Blog software available at the time. After a day of research, reading reviews and checking out websites that ran the software I was interested in I narrowed my investigations down to just 5 possibilities:
- Wordpress
- Typepad
- Drupal
- Mambo
- Joomla
- Some German CMS I cannot remember the name, very good reviews, forums not in English but I tried it anyway.
I wanted to upgrade my website as quick as possible to
present myself for an upcoming movie role. I wanted a Content Management System or possibly Blog software that would do the backend work and allow me to concentrate on adding content rather than writing code. After 3 weeks I was freaking, none
of the Content Management Systems or Blogs quite had everything I wanted, I was frustrated and getting tired of all this....
Joomla Vs The Others
Each one I tried had at least one of the 'essentials' from my shopping list missing. I tried 4 others before I got to Joomla.
I loaded Joomla up and ran it, god here we go, complex. I spent two days learning how to use it and put up a gallery of photos in coppermine and gallery2 and integrated both, put up content and organised modules. It was very good except I kept finding myself on the mambo forums looking for answers. And there was just 1 thing Joomla could not do that I had marked as essential.
It came down to a Joomla vs Mambo decision
Joomla Vs Mambo
So off to a Mambo full install, both photo galleries, go to add the plugins, half of them were missing and everything else i could not find, maybe they were there but not in a logical layout with bare descriptions on 90% of the components. Back to Joomla....
It took me 2 weeks to get enough content on the site to go live and then BAM! 2000 visitors first two days I started promoting! 4Gb of data transfer! Have a look at the site now, it would have taken me 10 years to program all that php myself.
Rather than waste time on technical stuff with the CMS I can concentrate on building the site content and value, and it is so easy.
It is an amazing process, everytime I think, geez it'd be nice if I could do that - a quick search on the forums or the extensions and I figure out how to do it, usually there are 2 or 3 viable options so I assess and take the one I like. If I cannot find the info I can usually modify what someone else has done easily.
I am sure you will find that Joomla will be exactly what you want, and if not - then it will be the best starting point to build from.
Now I am a full fledged Joomla user, I am happy with the site. The support forums have gotten a lot stronger (have a look at the Alexa ranking - 512th most trafficed site on the net) that means MANY people are there and active, continually. And they are very helpful.
Having now used Joomla Content Managment System for 2 months continual usage there is nothing I cannot do on it that I want, or even wish. The only thing that I would change is the layout to make it more logical for the user, but that is my design fault not the CMS. Maybe later I will fix this.
A side point in this is that since I have a content rich site at launch - the development time was minimised so I could spent more time writing articles - I launched and was indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN within 2 days. Though they have not yet indexed the whole site I am working on adding interlinks between relevant articles now.
That allowed me to get everything up and running with a minimum input
of work from me, as I still needed to concentrate on adding content.
After the initial rush of people to the site I thought I better add some advertising, I chose to add Google Adsense and other ways monetise your website
Surprisingly the first day it was up I made money - not a lot but more than I thought, this excited me. I let it run to get some baseline figures. I modified the look and positioning - I made a 10* INCREASE IN REVENUE with a few simple changes.
PS If I were to choose a pure blogging software it would be Wordpress.
*UPDATE: 3 years on and I still think I made the right choice taking Joomla as my CMS of choice. If it was Joomla Vs The Others again today I would still take Joomla - everything about the latest release has improved (a lot).
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