Convincing the Skeptics about Open Source and CMS

Since the dawn of Joomla! around 2005, there has long been a stigma that open source and freely available content managment systems are a ‘poor man’s’ web design tool.

Now, when I say ‘poor man’s’ web design tool, this means that people had a preconceived idea that web designers who used these free open source cms systems, did not have the skills to develop functional websites with their own skill set.

As I've used Joomla! and watched it grow over the past six years, along with the growth of my business which is based on Joomla!, it has been like watching a fine wine come of age. I remember in the early days customers asking me, 'DO YOU USE TEMPLATES', 'IS IT YOUR CMS SYSTEM', because of these pre-conceived ideas and questions people were very sceptical of web designers or developers who answered 'YES' to any of these.

Six years on, I can now safely say to all of these sceptics, 'Who's laughing now?'.

Like a fine wine, Joomla! now provides everything a website desires, and more. The community is ever growing and it always seems like somebody out there will help you if you have any questions.

It now seems like everybody knows about the main open source, content management systems on the internet today, and for some reason they all think they're experts.

Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal seem to be the main contenders that now dominate the open source marketplace. Many businesses and individuals have now based their business model on using nothing but open source CMS systems. (Including me!)

With every update that came with Joomla! came more promise and hope that I had chosen the best CMS to build my business around.

My questions to the Joomla! Community are:

• Have you convinced the sceptics that using a bespoke CMS is a greater risk than using an open source solution such as Joomla!?
• Have you convinced the sceptics that the word, 'TEMPLATE', does not mean that their site will look like every other website on the internet?

These are the two main questions we get asked when customers are looking for a new website and we still find one or two people decide not to use us because they think that Open Source CMS and template-based systems are a bad choice!!