Anyone experienced in creating sites with Joomla?

Hey guys/Gals

I have come up with a small idea which i want to carry out. I will need to be able to create nice but basic websites for potential customers. I was wondering if there is anyone out there who uses/recommends Joomla or any other free website creator as i will need to learn it all from scratch

Cheers

Why use Joomla? Wordpress in my opinion is one of the best due to the plugins and options. And.... Wordpress is free... Tons of free templates... And there are tons of inexpensive templates that can make a site look like a million bucks....

I have tried PHPBB, regular HTML5 templates, Simple Machines, Etc... and... Wordpress is the only one I'd recommend.

I don't agree with ^^ at all. Wordpress is great, but you run into walls with functionality, integration and are limited with user access levels (the last may have changed recently with a plug-in.) WP is a blog that can turn into a cool looking website - Joomla is a CMS (like Drupal) that are actual platforms for websites.

All mentioned have free templates, inexpensive templates and looks are totally up to the designer (or theme) - not platform.

You won't loose learning either one, but if you are going to build sites for professional businesses you might be better off learning Joomla so you don't run into walls when they request something that isn't cookie cutter. I admit 8 times out of 10 a site lands in the WP can "manage it" category, but why risk loosing the business? For a news site or blog site WP is a runaway for me. For anything else I go Joomla or Drupal.

I would recommend Wordpress as its not only easy for YOU to learn, it's easy for your CLIENTS to learn. Important! I have a Joomla-based company website and I absolutely HATE maintaining it. I had to teach my IT guys the ins-and-outs of it. Plus most of the plugins are paid. Wordpress on the other hand: easy, mostly free plugins.. oh, and tons of cheap templates you can base your clients' sites on!

Always Joomla over Wordpress.

Wordpress is nowhere near as flexible, and you will find it hard to manipulate any site you make and have to stick to the options of any theme you upload. Unless ofcourse all you're going to do is upload a logo into a template. Joomla however is highly malleable as you can manipulate every aspect of it. Plugins are free if you know where to look, even if you buy them you will use them over and over....

I will stand up for joomla too. Its a piece of cake to use, and give you total flexibility, and its very well organised. It has free plugins to the max. If your looking for the basics use wp though. :whee:

I fully agree with Usermg and jambox, with the only difference that I use Drupal instead of Joomla.
Wordpress is less flexible and more limited than Drupal and most probably Joomla. Even for a simple website I go for Drupal (or html). It looks much more complicated than it is. I even don't find it more complicated than WP.
There are more than enough plugins and themes. For the themes I use Artisteer btw wich makes that I have no need to look for free/payed templates that suit me (you can also use Artisteer for Joomla and WP).

Thanks for all the feedback guys!

Ive installed Joomla on a localhost and im testing it out to see if i can get my head round it

Cheers
Josh

I do recommend Joomla, it has lots of functionality compared to wordpress which can be had to use on some website designs

Some web guy at a WP meetup told me that WP does about 90 percent of what Drupal does...so most websites only require WP.

Not sure if this is true or not...Anyone know?

I know Joomla

I have worked in Joomla! 1.6/2.5 for a year full time and still do. IMO the admin interface is slower than it should be. When setting up a site for SEO there are 9 steps I must take which are not set up by default (2.5) and even then the URL re-writing is not intuitive, especially for individual blog posts.

For most lazy people making seo'd niche sites using blackhatworld for advice, wp is the way to go--thats what everyone here seems to do. If you are more of a coder, and are making a large, legitimate online community with different levels of user accounts, maybe different languages, building custom php extensions, perhaps Joomla! is best.

If you have specific Joomla! questions I can answer in a PM or here..