Benefits of a CMS Website

Probably the best part of having a CMS is that you can grow your website as your business grows. If you can only afford a few pages to be developed right now, that’s no problem! You can always add to it yourself or have your webmaster add extensions later on when you are more established.

What’s Included
Besides basic items that you need to run the CMS, you’ll also have some other cool features built in:

• Poll – take an online poll right on your site and view the stats
• Banner Manager – manage banner ads and view hit stats
• Who’s Online - you can see how many visitors and registered users are online at any given moment
• Search – internal search tool for visitors to location information contained within your site
• Contact – a simple contact form
• Links – a link manager to categorize links you recommend
• RSS Feed – syndicate your own site feed allowing others to subscribe or display others RSS feeds on your site

Expansion
Probably the biggest advantage to using a CMS is the ease in updating your own site. Businesses are no longer at the mercy of their webmasters schedule and don’t have to pay each time they need something changed. Add pages, menu items, articles, components, a store – basically whatever you need in a matter of minutes.

There are thousands of Extensions available for Joomla. Many free, but some of the more complex are either donation or relatively affordable. Extensions can range from interactive event calendars, forums, online chat, to ecommerce solutions. Just click install, and configure away!

Foundation
Joomla uses PHP programming language along with XHTML, JavaScript and CSS. This means that these sites “out of the box” will pass W3C Validation and CSS Validation standards. Benefits to following and having a web compliant site include:

• Increased compatibility with browsers (no labels on your site like: “Best viewed using Internet Explorer”)
• Ease in maintaining site thereby reducing future maintenance costs
• Consistency in colors, fonts and overall look and feel of site
• Accessibility broadens your audience by not excluding anyone
• Forward browser compatibility – designed for new browsers, not old/unused ones