The CSBS is a small consulting business for social/helping professions. From their web site: “Our goal is to increase a Strengths approach across all of the helping professions for work with individuals and families.”I was asked to build a basic web site for the company which they could maintain themselves. We installed the Joomla content management system, and customized a very basic open source template. A company employee attended a Joomla training to administer the site, but it became clear that the needs of the company were fairly basic and required a minimal investment of ramp-up time and money.

We were invested in Joomla at this point already, so I compensated for Joomla’s complexity with good information architecture. I placed the content which required editing and changing so that it could be revised and added to by logging into the front end. This eliminated the need for anybody at the company to “learn Joomla”. Instead, they simply logged in and click edit.I remain available to this client for more invasive site changes as needed. This was a great learning experience, and one of the reasons I’ve elected to move into building WordPress-based sites for myself and for smaller clients. Joomla is an enormous and enormously powerful tool that can do essentially anything a company needs. Unfortunately this can also be a stumbling block for non-developers and the mass of companies who have a need for a web presence but not a ton of resources to invest in properly using a CMS of this magnitute.