The Joomla CMS (content management system) provides you with much more than a Web site. Joomla is really a wonderful Web engine for your ideas, art and product sales. If you want to do it in a rather powerful way. If you have a specific information technology goal for your Web effort, then the Joomla can deliver at lot.

Joomla is backed by a huge community of developers all over the world. Joomla is available in dozens of languages. Joomla has hundred of very functional elements that add tremendously to it's power. Modules, Components and Bots for dozens of specialized functions.

The best part is that you just visit your own site, log in, and add or edit any content that you want. And you can do this from any online computer in any home, business or cyberCafe in the world. Sure you might need to learn a few more things, but as long as you're not a real dingbat, you can probably handle it. psychologically, it's a lot easier to handle this kind of site over the old style.

Joomla 1.0.8 comes with:

Components for:
Banners (basic banner ads)
Contacts (basic contacts)
Content
Frontpage
LogIn (staff login)
Messages (email with site users, i. e., staff)
Newsfeeds (a section to show newsfeeds from other sites)
Poll (basic 1-question polling)
RSS (publishes your newsfeed)
Site Search
Users (Several Tiers of users)
Weblinks (basic outgoing links lists)
Wrapper (pulls another site into your site)

Modules for display for some things above plus:
Archives
Latest News
Navigation Menues
Most Read
Newsflash
Poll
Ransom Image
Related Items
RSS Feed
Stats
Template Chooser
Who's Online

There are hundreds of other components and modules that add a lot of functionality.
These include:
Google Maps
Video & Audio
Weather
Blog
Estate Agent - (a neat Brit real estate listing component product)
Amazon storefronts
sort of "whatever you want" based on budget.

Template Driven
The "front end" look and feel of the site is determined by "the Template". Individual sections of a site can have different templates. You can ever allow viewers to select from several templates. There are hundreds of templates for Joomla sites available on the Web. Some are free of charge (if you keep the link to the designer) and some have to be bought. Customization of a free template is the simplest and lowest cost way to go. Design of a new template is more costly.

Base system:
Joomla 1.0.8 Joomla is open-source software released under GPL/GNU General Public License. Most software is free of charge. Some specialized components and modules charge fees.

Check taosmultimedia.com's Joomla Resources Center