What is Joomla?

Joomla! is the most powerful Open Source Content Management System on the planet.
Joomla! is a free open source framework and content publishing system designed for quickly creating highly interactive multi-language Web sites, online communities, media portals, blogs and eCommerce applications.
The name "Joomla" is Swahili for "all together".

How good is Joomla?

On the 14th of November 2007, Joomla! was announced as the the winner of the 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

Who uses Joomla!... apart from us?

Joomla! is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications. Here are just some of the ways this award winning CMS solution is used:

Corporate websites or portals
Online commerce
Small business websites
Non-profit and organizational websites
Government applications
Corporate intranets and extranets
School and church websites
Personal or family homepages
Community-based portals
Magazines and newspapers
the possibilities are endless…

Joomla! can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalogue, processing credit card payments or taking online reservations.

What is the difference between Joomla! and commercial CMS solutions?

Unlike commercial solutions that offer different versions according to your budget, Joomla! is available in just one all encompassing version - and it is cost free.
Many commercial CMS solutions boast a vast array of modules - in some cases up to 80. Joomla! offers an awesome amount of extensions that currently numbers at 2036.
Joomla! has an active community of more than 100,000 (validated) friendly users and developers.

The big advantage you should not overlook

If your company or organization hires a third party Joomla! developer such as 'Navega Bem' or builds in-house software using the Joomla! framework, you are building on an open platform that does not tie you to any one developer or to a proprietary, closed application.

Will my CMS website be search engine friendly?

CMS offers the best platform to develop sites that meet all the SEO requirements.
HTML layout is well formed with no nestled tables making it easy to read for crawlers.
We can ensure that URL's do not have any query strings. The URL's can be of the type www.yoursite.com/pagename.html Such URL's are extremely Search engine friendly.
Meta keywords can be defined at a global level (across the site) and also at page level.

Is a Joomla! CMS web site difficult to maintain?

Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.
Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new press releases or news items, manage staff pages, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site.

Is a Joomla! CMS website expensive?

The emergence of powerful, flexible, Open Source CMS's is truly a revolution in web technology. Firms like Interwoven, Broadvision, and of course Microsoft, have in the past dominated the CMS market with offerings that start at Euro 12,000 (plus plus PLUS)! Whilst it may seem too good to be true, highly functional CMS platforms are now available without licensing costs. It is true!
Today, 'Navega Bem' can develop a Joomla based Content Management System (CMS) web site for the same cost as a static site.

What is LAMP technology?

As an effective alternative to expensive proprietary software, LAMP technology (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) Open Source technologies are leading the websites and applications development market and have become the platform of choice for developing robust dynamic web solutions at an affordable cost.

What about multi-lingual web sites?

Probably one of the biggest advantages of our CMS solution is its ability to run multi-lingual web sites - and there is only one 'back office' to manage it all! Joomla recognises a users operating system and automatically displays a site in the users language if it is available. Of course users may switch to other languages as they wish.
'Navega Bem' has developed a 12 language hotel site for the Grande Real Villa Itália Hotel & Spa (including Russian) and maintaining the site is very simple for our client. The site also ranks very well indeed in the Google search engines of all the languages used.

Decentralised Editing on any browser!

Editing can be done with any normal web browser from anywhere in the world - or with your iPhone :)