Joomla!® Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site

INTRODUCTION

I ENTERED THE WEB WORLD IN 2000, back when we built web sites in Macromedia Dreamweaver 3, made our navigation buttons as JavaScript-based image rollovers, used tables for layout, and used the font tag and spacer GIF images quite liberally throughout our sites.

In those days, "weekend web masters" would buy a copy of Microsoft FrontPage on a Friday night, spend the weekend learning the software and configuring their web host, and by Monday morning, they were hanging out their shingle as a web professional.

In 2009, our weekend web masters are now Saturday web masters. Call up a hosting company, get them to buy a domain name for you and set up an open source content management system like Joomla, click a few buttons, and you've got a web site up in a day or less. What's more, you don't need to know any HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, what a web application is, or even what FTP is.

Many of my fellow web designer and web developer friends are shocked by this. What differentiates their years of experience from those who just installed Joomla for the first time yesterday? What justifies your higher hourly rate?

Actually, those of us who have been in the business for a while know that clicking the buttons is just a part of the process. The more languages you know (HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.), the more customizations you can make to the client's site.

But is that all? We know HTML and CSS and they don't? We've built a dozen Joomla sites before and they are on their first one or two? What about ...