Are You Sick And Tired Of Being
"Held Hostage" By Your Web Designer?

 1. Enter your username and password.

 2. Edit Icons Appear

3.  Click on an Edit Icon -
Your site turns into a Word Processor!

Just a few years ago, this kind of software was only available for thousands of dollars. 

Now anyone can build a site like this.
With FREE open source software called "Joomla!".

• Update your site yourself anytime you want to -
  no need to call a webmaster.
• Make your site engage the user with new photos, audio and video - add photos, audio and video to your site with a few mouse clicks. 
• Assign your staff to keep all or part of the site up-to-date - create new logins for as many people as you want.
• Keep your audience informed of new things on your site - Automatically notify others via email that your site has changed.
• Build powerful site navigation automatically - Joomla! automatically builds menus, navigation, site maps, even RSS feeds and Google site maps.

"Yeah, but I don't need to change my site often."

You do need to change your site often if you want the search engines to visit it often. When search engines index a site, they check whether the site has changed from the last time the search engine indexed the site. If the site has not changed, the search engine will delay the next indexing of the site - up to three months or even longer. 

If you want changes to your site to be picked up by Google, or even if you want to improve your page ranking in Google, you need to have frequent updates to your website. 

 "Yeah, but I can edit my site with blog software." 

Blog software like Wordpress can be a good way to get an editable site. But if you are running a business or other organization, you need more than a blog. You also need one or more of the following:

• Newsletter - keep in touch with your customers
• Form Builder - find out what your customers want
  
• Forums - let your site users answer each other's questions
• Shopping Cart - sell your products online
  
• Let multiple people build your site - not just for one person
• Document Management - put documents online for members-only download

If you like Wordpress, you can have Joomla AND Wordpress - using a Joomla plugin that installs Wordpress right into your Joomla site. 

Most business sites are not formatted like a blog. The best option is to have a standard content site with a blog as just one part of the content. This is what Joomla delivers. Hundreds of pre-made Joomla templates exist that can give your business or other organization a professional appearance. 

 "Yeah, but I already have a website."

The look of a Joomla site is stored in a simple template file. You can customize that file to make it look any way you want, including like your existing site.

There are also hundreds of beautiful, professional templates already existing for Joomla.

Here is just one site with great professional Joomla! templates . 

You might find a template you like better than your existing design. You can take your existing graphics and incorporate them into the Joomla template. Then you can add all the content from your old site into Joomla!. Joomla! automatically builds the menus and pages. 

Installing Joomla! means that not only do you get a site that you can update easily, you get just about every feature that a business or non profit organization needs. And everything is designed with the same emphasis on ease of use.

 "Yeah, but if this is so great, how come I haven't heard of it before?"

The reason you may not have heard of Content Management Software before is that until fairly recently it was extremely expensive. If you work for a big corporation you have probably heard of it or used it.

Blog software is a kind of comparatively simple Content Management Software that is readily available. But until fairly recently there was no low cost CMS system aimed at the average non-expert user.  

If you have not heard of "Joomla!" you may have heard of "Mambo", a predecessor product to Joomla!. The developers of Mambo created Joomla! as a successor to Mambo.

Joomla! is currently one of the world's most popular web applications,
with thousands of popular sites worldwide in dozens of languages. 

A Powerful Control Panel

Joomla! is more than just a word processor in a browser for your site. Joomla! comes with  a Control Panel that you can use to administer your site in a very effective way. The design of this "backend" reflects the overall Keep It Simple philosophy of the Joomla! designers. This is truly an enterprise application designed to be easy to be used by the average  busy manager or non-specialist.

The first page of the Joomla! Control Panel:

A Modular Approach

The key to the power of Content Management Software is that, unlike a regular website the content is separated from the pages. In Joomla! pages are assembled from separate content-holding modules.

Why is this a powerful technique? Here's one simple example. This page you are reading is being displayed on a Joomla! site. Notice that the tutorial password invitation is repeated in multiple parts of the page. In a standard website, this would be text repeated in the page file. If you wanted to edit this text, you would have to edit it multiple times. In Joomla! this tutorial signup section is actually a single module. The page designer just told Joomla! to display that content at multiple points on this page. Updating the text for that module in Joomla! to change it everywhere it appears. 

If this technique makes a single page site easier to administer, imagine what it can do for a site that has lots of pages with different types of items on each page. 

Here's the Module Manager in the Joomla! Control Panel. The Module Manager makes it easy to publish, unpublish, rearrange, add or delete modules and to specify which pages they should appear on.

Lots of Addons

Use the Control Panel to add Joomla! plugins with a few clicks. Here is a screenshot of the popular OpenSEF plugin which allows you to create "search engine friendly" URLs (a URL is a page address like http://www.15minutesite.com/services.html), Google Sitemaps and more.

 Everything a business or organization needs on a website...

"Curbside Appeal" is the way your business looks from the outside or from the road as people walk by. If it isn't appealing, people won't come in. Use Joomla! to put a professional appearance on your website - one that you can customize or even change any time you want. All pages get a consistent look.

Easy Updating: as we've shown, Joomla! turns into a word processor right in the browser. You can give different users logins, and specify whether other users' content needs to be approved before it becomes visible. Being able to easily post pictures and media like audio and video is also valuable.

Blog: Put fresh content on your site - and let readers comment. The more fresh content, the more interesting your site appears to a search engine. Submit your blog to directories where journalists search daily for stories to pick up.

RSS Feeds (Syndication): Blog software has popularized a technology called Really Simple Syndication that is also built in to Joomla!. RSS files are created automatically. RSS files are simple lists of the most recent content on your site, with title, author, and description. Directories and individuals can "subscribe" to these files using software that reads the file and displays it in a convenient format. If you want news organizations to pick up content from your site, and you want people to look at content that is regularly added to your site, RSS is essential. Joomla! RSS is more powerful than blog RSS because a single Joomla! site can have any number of RSS files automatically generated for different site sections.

Newsletter: If someone comes to your site and is interested in what you are offering, you want to be able to keep in touch with them. Let them sign up for your newsletter. Compose and send HTML newsletters from within Joomla.

Sitemaps: your site needs a page linking to every other page on the site so that users can easily find what they are looking for. You need another sitemap for Google, so that you can take advantage of Google's sitemap features, which ensure that your site is properly indexed and lets you see records of how many visits each page is getting.

Statistics: you need to keep track of page visits easily. Most hosting providers have some kind of statistics available but the average business tends to find it inconvenient to check these statistics regularly. Joomla! makes it as convenient as can be - view statistics right in the Joomla! administration interface.

Link Directory: having a directory of links is something that can be useful in providing content that your visitors will find useful, and is an important factor in improving position in some search engines.

...and virtually everything a business or organization might want:

Polls: Create instant polls for your users, let users vote and see the results.

RSS Reader: Incorporate RSS feeds from other sites into your site automatically.

Document Manager: Publish documents to your site and restrict access to particular users. Allow users to submit documents for publication.

Site Advertising: easily add banners, Google Adsense, affiliate links and other types of third party advertising to all pages or to particular sections of your site with a few mouse clicks.

Hundreds of additional components available: Check out the Joomla! Extensions Directory for an idea of the amazing number and variety of Joomla! plugins that are available. The Joomla! Extensions Directory has reader and editor ratings and comments. New plugins appear weekly.

Create your own Custom Components: Not only is the Joomla! source code freely available, it is specifically designed to be easy to work on. There are hundreds of freelance Joomla! programmers available and many companies specializing in Joomla! coding. If you can't find a component implementing the feature that you want, hire someone to create it. If a component isn't working right, hire someone to fix it.