That is not true, of course, so in addition to such WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors as Microsoft FrontPage, Apple iWeb or Adobe Dreamweaver you also have different tools, like Joomla, to choose from. Straight off, be aware that Joomla is not a direct competitor to the foregoing products, although there is certainly some overlap. It is not exactly a precise alternative to WordPress, either, although it and Joomla are both called Content Management Systems (CMS).
Same difference or not?
People still have rather flexible definitions for CMS, but all of them were developed as ways to ensure that website pages could be easily updated and maintained, including adding and removing pages with a minimum of fuss. This is often taken to mean that Joomla, as a CMS, is a blogging tool and communications platform, competing with WordPress and others like it. Again, this may or may not be true in your particular case. You are not limited by Joomla, but by your expertise in using it, as regards the type of sites you can create and maintain.
Why use Joomla? Why not one of the commercial WYSIWYG products? There are a number of reasons to use Joomla, for site creation and especially for ongoing management and maintenance.
Joomla, of course, is Open Source, which means it's free. There is no licensing fee to pay, and certainly no $399 price tag like some programs.
Because Joomla is Open Source, you have access to a huge global community, with thousands of users online at any given moment. Many of them would be quite happy to provide your some needed support. Not only is there online help, you can join forums in scores of countries and meet other users in person.
Millions of sites around the world run on Joomla. It is very popular and is widely used, which means that whatever issue you encounter as far as maintenance has likely been seen before a few (or a few thousand) times.
Because of its power and popularity, there have been numerous books, articles, how-to blogs and whitepapers written about Joomla. This material has come from a great variety of perspectives so there are bound to be some very specific matches to your particular needs.
From maintenance to upgrades
A very compelling feature of Joomla is the ease with which you can extend its functionality. This "extensibility" lets you build anything from a virtual brochure website to a highly complex membership organization, with all the e-commerce and communications bells and whistles you could possibly want. When your maintenance routine involves adding everything from discrete pages to videos, image galleries or user forums, you have 3500 add-ons and plug-ins that can give you extended capabilities for speeding the process along.
Altering a site's look and feel, in a gradual or sudden manner, is also a maintenance task that used to promise a dull evening. With the Joomla templates now available, you can do this without having to start from scratch. In seconds, literally, you can revise the design, layout and colors of the site without touching the content. There are thousands of free templates you can use, "as is" or with your unique revisions, to take your site wherever you want to go visually.
Bottom line?
WordPress is extremely popular and also makes maintenance, especially adding pages, quite simple and quick. Like Joomla, WordPress has a lot of free templates that make it an extremely attractive candidate for building websites quickly and easily. However, you need to keep in mind the fact that WordPress is, quite frankly, a blogging platform. It has a good number of plug-ins available to extend its functionality in a few areas, but as yet it does not possess the raw power "under the hood" that Joomla has. Considering its underlying infrastructure, WordPress will not allow you to set up a shopping cart with a quick plug-in move and the user community is smaller and less, well, "communitarian."
The main strength for Joomla is its flexibility and capacity to do good work that ends up looking and acting a lot of different ways. If you only need a blog editor, fine, WordPress may meet all your needs. On the other hand, if you do more extensive website work, with a wider ranges of "looks and feels," then the choice is clear. It's Joomla, all the way.
