Website building/maintenance - Joomla

[The Biznut]

Anybody on OCR have experience with Joomla? I have very little and while my limited knowledge is enough to make the necessary minor changes on my business website (www.gpdj.ca) I run into issues from time to time that I simply can't seem to figure out. Now that schools done, I am going to spend more time trying to get myself more acquainted with Joomla.

Does anybody here know / use Joomla?

Does anybody know of an alternative that is painless to pickup? I have a such a thing doesn't really exist, but I really don't know. I can do a lot, but I have very little experience with websites.

Thanks

[Yoozer]

You seem to be using it mostly for plain static pages and a blog. Wordpress is a dozen times more lightweight and gives sane URLs - though if you want more than that, I haven't found anything that's reasonably easy - either you have to learn some kind of framework and code it yourself or you have to deal with a horrible module system which has its own microcosm language.

In other words it all sucks.

[big giant circles]

I used to use Joomla. I switched to Wordpress recently and hoooooly crap, it is 1000x better.

Joomla is horrible IMO. Doing things that should be simple (like building a navigation bar or adding a new page) are extremely complex and take about 5 more steps than they should. With Wordpress it's like a "click here, type words, click here" thing. Themes are super easy to install/change to if you get bored easily or just enjoy variety.

[The Biznut]

Thanks for the helpful answers guys, I'll definitely give Wordpress a shot soon here, and from the sounds of things I'll probably feel the same way about it as you do, BGC.

[Maco70]

You could always hire some random forum guy who just graduated college and is scratching for a job.

Just a thought.

If not, wordpress or blogger are the way. Domain registration is around $10, so just buy a domain and register it to either.

[CodeD64]

The problem with Wordpress is if you use it you're gonna have to tack on WP's 19 bucks a year, to redirect your WP blog to your own website (.com/etc.) if you have one.

On top of that, Redirecting may also cause you some SEO problems (search engine optimizations) because it might see your wordpress blog and your actual website url as duplicates of each other and skip one or the other in search results.

Joomla is really good. It just takes a little time getting used to but once you've got everything configured how you want it, it's great.

It's infinitely more customizable because you can host it on your own domain/host service without the need for being tied down to a third party provider.