A large number of our clients are not a new business looking for a website, but existing businesses looking to upgrade to a site that is not only more current, but something that they are able to update themselves. Using a Content Management System like Joomla is what allows our clients to update their own site and stay current with specials, prices, newsletters etc. While full-coded websites derived from Dreamweaver were once dominant, they lacked customers the ability to update their site, unless all of the files of the website were transferred to the customers site.
Many times the dreamweaver version was out of date, or the web designer had lost the files, possibly the version they created the site on was so out of date that they simply won't reply to many people who had their site created in the earlier 2000's on dreamweaver and other similar platforms. This has spawned a new generation of websites and the web designers, and that is the generation of the CMS: Content Management System.
While I will try to just brush over the Wordpress vs. Joomla debate, it is clear that not everyone is going to simply decide on one content management system to use. Here at Choice Web Design we prefer Joomla for the following reasons: There are more templates available, there are more user access restrictions (meaning we can have several people working on one website at the same time) and at the end of the day, Wordpress looks like a blog. That's because it started as a blog, which eventually morphed into a Content Management System.
While this term really frustrates Wordpress people, I consider Wordpress to be a "Blog on Steroids". At the end of the day I think someone could pretty much achieve anything they wanted to achieve on either of the platforms but there are simply more templates and more module locations available on Joomla. This gives our customers more versatility in the look and layout of their website.
One benefit of Wordpress, is that it is a very easy to use blog. With Joomla for example to have people able to comment on blogs, you need to install one of the various extensions on the market for this to work. You can then have a lot of control as to whether or not they have to register for your site before they comment, or can random people come and comment. Then of course you have to fight off the spammers. With Wordpress this is built right into it, as it is a feature that began with blogs.
I think that for customers looking to write on their website daily, or someone that is essentially looking for a blog with a few advanced features along the way, that wordpress is the better choice. But for everything else from small businesses to large businesses to membership sites, support sites with forums and more, Joomla is the way to go.
