Nadine was delighted to win our Twitter Re-Tweet competition!

At the end of last year we had a fantastic response to our  Twitter Re-Tweet competition – the prize was a free place on any of our public training courses.

Our lucky winner was Nadine Burzler (@NadineBurzler) who works at Cactus Language Worldwide.

Nadine was delighted to win the competition and has chosen a free place on our 2-day Dreamweaver course as her prize. She also chose to extend this to come on the whole Web Design Week package, which includes our Web Design training and Web Graphics Photoshop Course.

When she told us why, we realised that there couldn’t have been a more worthy winner…

Nadine has been planning to move to Mexico to live with her boyfriend, and was actually in Mexico visiting him when she was chosen at random as our winner.

Nadine had been planning for a while to arrange some Web Design training in Brighton, Sussex, so that she could still earn a living once she’s moved abroad. She told how she felt when she had won…

“I was ecstatic and so happy that life was giving me the tools to fulfill my dreams… little did I know 2-3 months ago what I wanted to do or how I was going to make a living in Mexico of all places and now, thanks to re-tweeting, twitter and SBT I will be taking a one-week course and embark on a journey of independence, learning how to create my own e-commerce website and generate an income from home, being with the man I love.”

We’re looking forward to seeing Nadine for her training in March – and we’re really happy this will help her so much with her plans!

We’ll be announcing more competitions where you can win free training soon – so keep your eyes peeled on the Competitions category of this Blog.

Related posts:

1. Twitter Re-Tweet Competition Winner
2. Win Free Training – Twitter Retweet Competition NOW CLOSED!
3. Twitter changes tactics: the future of Twitter
4. Monitor Your Brand on Twitter – Top 5 Tools
5. “My Home Town” Photography Competition winner

Should I use Joomla or WordPress?

This article will show the pros and cons of each tool so that you can make an educated choice.

WordPress

WordPress is  a really great blog creation tool. It makes simple tasks really easy like adding images, making pages and posts, managing comments etc. Installing it, running it, and publishing basic content with it is quick and simple. It is efficient and allows easy optimising for maximum search engine ranking (blog searchbots, ping /trackback/tag capability etc)

Joomla

Joomla, is geared  towards portals and content management. It is extremely powerful and has much more capability than wordpress. It’s also much easier to go wrong with Joomla if you don’t know what you are doing. It demands more technical knowledge. If you want an image library or an extensive  ecommerce site however you are going to need something more powerful than wordpress for the job. Joomla comes into it’s own when you require it to work with a custom database.

Joomla Advantages

• More versatile
• More types of components, modules like:
  • Article directories
  • Good for large E Commerce sites
  • Image libraries
  • Multiple user privileges
  • Custom databases

Joomla Disadvantages

• More complicated
• More difficult to fix when things go wrong
• Needs more technical knowledge

WordPress Pros

• Easier to maintain
• Simpler for blogging
• WordPress brilliant user experience

WordPress Disadvantages

• More limited in application
• Less scalable
• Less scalable E commerce solution

Joomla V WordPress Conclusion

If you have a small to medium size business and will be managing your site in house then WordPress is currently your best open source (free) option to manage and update your website on a daily basis, tasks are very easy to accomplish. WordPress has an amazing community around it and good documentation so fixing things, it’s easy to add plugins for just about anything and there is great support documentation. You can add on E commerce solutions see WP e-Commerce plugin for WordPress.

The main reason for choosing Joomla is it’s power and flexibility. The capabilities of Joomla are endless. If you need something for a large organisation or community Joomla has a complex multiple user privilege system. For multiple user groups Joomla is the best system, users can login and view different content that is user privilege dependent. There are Ecommerce modules and Image Libraries available. Joomla like WordPress has an amazing community based around it, but documentation is less easy to find and follow.

Anyone with technical know how might prefer Joomla, but for the average client WordPress is far easier to handle.

Using both WordPress and Joomla!

It is possible to use them both, just to confuse you. If you were a developer this is quite a good option as wordpress is still the best blogging freeware around. It is possible to create a great all singing and dancing site with Joomla and integrate a wordpress blog just for the blogging side of things. This is now possible with new third party applications see here.

Amendment 25th Nov 2009

Thanks Marcia Cole for your comment, Pods are indeed a very exciting development allowing customisation of databases for WordPresss. You would need some developer experience to make the most of these, however, you would need at least that much experience to use joomla with customised databases.

There are many off the shelf, customisable themes available and Woothemes are one of the best and most competitively priced. These are great if you are  developing a new site.

So the answer to your question is yes in my opinion WordPress may well be leaving all of its nearest competitors behind.

Update – 2nd Dec 2009

We’ve had a great quote from Tanel Raja in a discussion we’ve started on the LinkedIn WordPress Group – “I think that WordPress is C in CMS while Joomla is M. One is about content and other is about management”

We think that sums it up nicely Tanel!

Related posts:

1. WordPress Training Course Launched
2. Joomla Training Courses now Public
3. New Joomla! Training Course Availalbe Now!
4. Using Dreamweaver CS5 with Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.
5. Will WordPress Kill Dreamweaver? We say NO!