Date: 3 Oct 2009 Comments: 0

One of the best and most affordable ways of building a website is by implementing an open source website management system such as Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla and there are many others too.

Joomla is the most popular web content management system available today, and is the one we will focus on for this lesson. Like the other platforms mentioned it costs nothing! All you pay for is hosting which can be as low as $4 or $5 per month depending on where you go. Hosting is also a cost incurred in any website venture, regardless of what system you build it with.

The open source content management system, or CMS for short, is a web based application you then run on your web host.

Sound tricky? It’s actually very easy, many web hosts offer quick setups for the most popular open source apps, so your site can be up and running in a matter of minutes. Check with your host though – not all web hosts provide the quick setup tools mentioned. Don’t lose heart if they don’t – you can still do a manual install with just a little more work (we won’t cover that today).

From there you will probably want to customize the look and feel of your site – these systems all come with a default template, but it’s usually quite simple! There are plenty of free template design options available though.

For the Joomla Content Management System we recommend getting started with one of these Free Joomla Templates – it will give you a good idea for what is possible, and will most likely provide you with a solid and professional design for years to come. After you have got a handle on the system you may want to look at upgrading to a professional Joomla template for which there are also many available at very reasonable prices, usually from around $30 upwards.

10 years ago a website with the level of functionality found in Joomla would have set you back half a million dollars – Isn’t amazing what we can do today thanks to the open source community!