Why should I be using Joomla or Wordpress for my website development?
This is the question the layman asks when he comes across tools like Joomla, Magento and Wordpress, which are used for web development. The answer is simple- simplicity and cost effectiveness. Joomla, Wordpress and Magento are content management systems. Now, what is a content management system (CMS)? A CMS is a platform which manages the content and maintains it in proper running order. It is like a library of books with everything catalogued. With a CMS, a person just needs to upload the content on the hosting server and the CMS takes it up from there. There is little or no technical knowledge needed to handle a CMS. So, if you have asked your web development guy to develop your website using Joomla, Wordpress or Magento, you could learn to handle your website yourself within minutes. You won’t need to bug your developer every now and then to make the requisite changes. That is simplicity for you. Second comes the cost factor. Joomla, Wordpress and Magento are open source platforms and can be used for free by anybody and everybody. That’s cost effectiveness number one. Secondly, these are open source platforms. Open source means that anybody can customise it to his/her own need. But how’s that cost effective? Joomla, Wordpress and Magento come with a basic module with some basic features. Using these features, you can set up a basic website for your corporate business or develop a basic shopping cart or e-commerce website. It can be done within minutes. But in case you need to customise it and add features that are not already there, a web development company can easily do it; reason being that there aren’t thousands of lines of code to go through with these open source platforms. These platforms can be customised within minutes by people with the right knowledge. Thus, it requires minimal man-hours to build a Joomla, Magento or Wordpress based website. And less man- hours always mean less cost. That’s cost effectiveness number two. Another factor which gives these open source platforms an edge over other methods of website development is that these platforms, especially Wordpress, come with search engine optimisation tools. For a Wordpress hosted website, it is possible to insert keywords in the URL itself as well as assign categories and tags to each post on your website with the help of clear permalink. Thus, using Wordpress or Joomla for your web development needs helps you in saving cost on the SEO front as well. That’s cost effectiveness number 3. And then, there are other usual advantages that any open source software has like free plug-ins, flexibility and reliability, since there is a whole community of developers enhancing the platforms constantly. With such advantages, it is hard to ignore these open source CMS while developing a website. Testimony to the success of these platforms is thousands of websites which currently run on them; and all of them run smooth.
