When You Should Choose Joomla As Your Website Platform
Geoffresh SEO Web Design uses two Content Management Systems (CMS) as their web design platforms: Joomla and WordPress. Our servers are specifically designed to deploy these CMS platforms and are optimized such that either of them can perform the best they can. But which platform should you choose for your website—WordPress or Joomla?
We explore the strengths and weaknesses of Joomla in this article.
When you think of how a website is built, Joomla isn’t one that most of the public know, but did you know that major brands and entities use it? Harvard University, Lipton Tea, IKEA, Guggenheim Museum—the list will continue to surprise you.
When To Use Joomla
Joomla is a very diverse platform that has been around for many years. It's gone through a few names already (starting out as Mombo) before reaching its current name of Joomla. Many big name brands use Joomla as their CMS of choice. While this may be an unusual or unheard of name, it does have many strengths.
Strengths Of Joomla
- Built With SEO-In-Mind: Out-of-the-box, Joomla has nearly everything you need for starting off with great SEO. You have the ability to add title tags, meta descriptions, and even decide if the page should be indexed or not indexed by the search engines, as well as letting the spiders know if they should follow links on this page or not follow them. Joomla also is a lean CMS. Meaning that, if not overloaded with plugins, modules, and components, it has a very fast loading speed for users, as well as the search spiders (who use page load speed as a ranking factor).
- Login And User Profiles Built-In: If you need a website that gives your users the ability to log in and control their own data, this platform has that built in right from the get-go. You can specify pages, or even just sections of pages that your specific users can see. You can designate users who are administrators, editors, employee, subscriber, etc. You can also create custom user groups with specific permissions. One of your users can even request to have their personal data deleted if need be and that's because Joomla has use privacy in mind.
- Robust Database: The database system for Joomla is very well thought out and as a result, it's a robust CMS. There are many entries for each section of Joomla. So if there is an issue with only one section (such as a corrupt data point entry), then only that section will be non-functional. If there is a mistake and the issue is more widespread—such as an incorrect value for allowing a user to log in—this value can most likely be altered in the database itself.
- Powerful Templates: The templates of Joomla can be very powerful. Some can even expand the abilities of Joomla itself! With Joom you can even choose multiple templates for different parts of your website. If you want to change your admin section of the website to a different template for a different workflow, you have that ability. If you want to give your users a different experience per section of your front-end website, you have that ability as well. In other words, you can have different templates installed to give it a different look and feel as per your need!
Weaknesses Of Joomla
- A Limited Blog: For those who love to blog, this platform has the capability, however, it does not look the best. There are abilities to show related articles, latest articles, and even most read articles. However, that is about it. It doesn't allow for image previews in the "read more" sections easily.
- Difficult To Master: Joomla is not the most intuitive design for anyone not experienced with web design. Some users may get lost without proper training and be confused as to why their title or meta description changes don't reflect as there are two sections for these inputs. The user access levels may also confuse some people as well as it is very complex.
- Contact Section Is Limited: The contact us component of this CMS seems a bit clunky. It has specific items that must always be included, and it's confusing to add in additional fields. Also, the fields don't allow for you to place them above the main items that are required by the component.
When Do We Recommend Using Joomla As Your Platform Of Choice?
One of the items we pride ourselves on at Geoffresh is SEO —that's why we usually recommend moving forward with Joomla as the platform of choice with the SEO abilities built right in, without the need for additional plugins. If possible, we try to avoid adding in additional plugins when the base system can do it with the same or similar affects.
Joomla is also very flexible for most of our clients and is a great choice for websites that are informational, and just need a contact form or need the ability to have users log in to see their account with you. Joomla can also be expanded to online booking systems or even e-commerce capabilities.
If you do need blogging as a pivotal part of your website strategy, Joomla can do the job, but it doesn't provide the greatest discoverability of new articles and related ones. Also, if you need junior members of your team to log in and modify something the website without contacting your web dev team, this platform might not be the best choice. While Joomla is powerful, it is more complex. We do offer packages where we can assist on a monthly basis to provide these updates.
If you are interested in having our team build you a website using Joomla please reach out to us and we can get you started the right way!