Oh no, not another blog on Joomla!

I can hear you think, and you are partially right: there are a myriad of Joomla! blogs on the Internet. So what makes this blog different?

It might be best if I introduce myself and tell you why on God’s green earth I started the Practical Joomla! blog.

My name is Robin Roelofsen, and I live in a town called Almere in the Netherlands.

Back in 2002 I started being a personal fitness trainer as a profession next to my IT job at Unisys in the Netherlands. I had been dabbling a bit with building websites before using Frontpage, but that never led to anything.  Now I wanted to design a decent website for my personal training business, using a decent website building tool. A friend of mine gave me a copy of Dreamweaver, and I never looked back.

On the personal training business website I started posting articles, and soon it got a bit out of hand. I quit doing personal training, but the website had gained so much popularity within the bodybuilding and fitness people in the Netherlands, I kept updating my website on a regular basis.

In the meantime I started and stopped a couple of other websites, all built in Dreamweaver, and I kept redesigning the websites as well. The fitness website has gone through a lot of changes over the years due to my ever increasing knowledge of Dreamweaver and HTML.

The problem using Dreamweaver to build websites is the amount of work involved. Every page needs to be created and modified – to make it look right – manually in a template (yes, I was smart enough to create and use a template). Each and every page needs to be manually linked to from every page a link needs to be set up on. Changes to the structure are hard to do without screwing up the entire site. In a word, it was terrible to keep track of all the things that needed to be done.

In 2009, I wanted to set up a website for Dutch seniors, and knew from the start it was going to be a large site. I really did not want to use HTML anymore, and started looking for a better solution.

Then I found the content management system Joomla!

Joomla! was in the cpanel Fantastico DeLuxe package on my US-based host, and I installed it. Man, what a difference that made! I was totally lost at the start, but using the Joomla! website, Joomla! for Dummies and the forums, I managed to create a very nice-looking site!

At the end of last year, I started manually copying over my Dreamweaver-built Dutch fitness site to Joomla! as well, and I vowed to not use anything else than a CMS anymore.

In the process of building these sites, I ran into all kinds of problems, found very good extensions and came up with a lot of personal solutions to design issues. Now I want to share what I learned with those working with Joomla! and are as much at a loss as I was when I started.

I will work hard getting Practical Joomla! filled with the information you need to setup and run a great Joomla!-based website!