Is Joomla a Right Choice to Start a Blog?

There are a lot of blogging tools available on the web, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type, Chyrp CMS, b2evolution, Textpattern, NucleusCMS, Geeklog, and much more. All of these tools are powerful and user-friendly enough for you to set up a blog successfully and easily. And in below, we mainly discuss starting a blog with the second CMS.

Joomla is a free, open source, and award-winning content management system (CMS), which is written in PHP, stores data in a MySQL, MS SQL, or PostgreSQL database, and includes a lot of competitive features like object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques, software design patterns, page caching, RSS feeds, blogs, and multiple language versions, etc. At present, it has been regarded as the second most used CMS on the Internet after WordPress, used by millions of webmasters all over the world, including so many famous organizations like MTV Networks Quizilla, IHOP, Harvard University, Citibank, The Green Maven, and Outdoor Photographer.

Is Joomla a Right Choice for Blogging?

The answer is definitely YES. A good blogging tool should be helpful for you to build a blog easily, with unique and attractive layout and designing style, chances for functional extensibility, and high search engine rankings. If you are looking for such a powerful blogging tool, just try Joomla, as it can do all of these for you without costing you even one penny. Here is a list of features you can make use of when setting up your brand new blog site.

• Ease of Use – Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up with a trouble free dashboard, so even a newbie can build and manage a new blog easily. Besides, almost all the web hosts now offer a 1-click installer for Joomla, which helps you start your blog in just a few minutes.
• Extendibility – Joomla really shines in its extendibility, with almost 7000 extensions available in Joomla official site, aiming to extend the functionality of your blog with social networking, banner advertising, comment section, multimedia, RSS feeds, multiple languages and much more.
• Media Manager – This tool is integrated into the Article Editor tool, which allows you to easily upload, delete, and configure any media files or folders at any time.
• Language Manager – This tool is very useful when you need your blog in one language and dashboard in another. It supports for UTF – 8 coding and almost 40 different world languages like English, Arabic, German, French, Polish, Swedish and much more.
• Banner Management – This feature is beneficial if you are going to make money from your blog. It allows you to add as many banners as you need with impressive words, images, logos, and URLs, so you can do the advertising and promotional activities effectively.
• Content Management – Joomla has a simplified three-tiered system, which helps you create and organize your content any way you like with the easy to use WYSIWYG editor. If you only want to create standardized layouts which suit for all types of articles, then simply utilize the “Images and Links” options in the right column of the article. Once you’ve created your article, you can choose to publish it, e-mail it to a friend, or save as PDF file. Besides, there are a lot of modules installed by default to show you the most popular articles and the related articles.
• Update Notifications – Running your blog with the old versions of Joomla can expose your blog to some hacking or attacking dangers, so you need to keep your Joomla up to date. Instead of visiting the official site of Joomla frequently to see whether there is a new version or not, you can take advantage of the Joomla notification area in administrator control panel, which will notify you immediately if you need to upgrade.
• SEO – Joomla is undoubtedly as SEO friendly as many other CMS like WordPress, with the simple, clean, and consistent code. Besides, Joomla offers so many SEO extensions which can greatly enhance the volume and quality of traffic to your blog, as well as the visibility on the Internet.

How to Start you Blog with Joomla

Joomla Installation
In fact, the installation process for Joomla is quite simple. You only need to download the Joomla at Joomla.org, unzip the downloading file and upload it via a FTP program, create a database, and finally complete the installation in the Joomla Web Installer page. However, if you feel it is hard for you to do all of these, then you can resort to the powerful 1-click Joomla installer, such as SimpleScripts, Fantastico, Softaculous, and QuickInstall.

In this article, we haven’t introduced how to install Joomla, because we have listed the detailed steps in How to Set up a Forum Using Joomla, both manually and via 1-click installer.

Joomla Hosting Company
Every website needs a hosting company to host, so does your blog. As the quality of hosting service varies among different web hosts, you have to choose a truly reliable one offering Joomla friendly hosting solution. In this aspect, we suggest you going with HostGator.

Established in 2002, HostGator (http://www.hostgator.com/) is one of the most famous web hosts with a good track record. It leverages the power of world class data centers and state-of-the-art technologies to ensure a 99.9% uptime. This company pays much attention to customer service, allowing customers to contact them via phone, e-mail, and live chat 24×7. Besides, to make installing Joomla an easy thing, it integrates a QuickInstall 1-click Joomla installer with cPanel.