Joomla vs Wordpress

Well, like everything else, it matters what YOU want to do with it!

Wordpress is super easy to setup and can be very flexible but to be so you have to deal with a hodgepodge of plugins, made all the more complicated by the fact that there has been a version upgrade every few weeks for the last few years, which invariably breaks plugins, which mean you have to clean up the mess, and the plugins are often unsupported yada, yada, yada. Yes, most WP themes look like blogs because that is it's primary market.

Joomla doesn't upgrade as often (ask anyone who has been waiting for 1.6!) and when it does, most modules and components are not affected. Joomla add-on options are not as wide but certainly as deep as WP's (instead of 10 add-ons that do the the same thing there will be 1 - 3) so if you need something done in Joomla, you will probably find a supported product that can do it without programming from scratch.

The real deciding feature of each is - what is the most important thing you need to do? Once you have that, which platform has the best tool set and add-ons for what you want to do? When I recently built a site about Joomla, I actually built it in Wordpress because I was unhappy with Joomla's add-on tools for membership sites and Wordpress had several choices that met my needs more completely. I was willing to wrangle with the "blog look issue" so that the back-end had the options that I wanted to have.

Well if you are dependent on SEO traffic then I'd say an important part, maybe the most important part of your decision should be how well search engines react to the tool. There is a reason why Wordpress is the defacto standard among affiliate marketers. Simply put, Google eats it up. Something built in to WP (beyond merely the fact that it's a blog platform) causes Google to rank sites built with WP higher and more easily than any other platform. I don't know what the magic is, but I do know that as a total newb last year I got 4 out of 5 sites I built into the top 5 within a couple weeks using WP.

I've never had those kinds of results with anything else.

If it is just articles, I would probably go with Wordpress.

If you want to do different stuff with your information (directories, photo galleries, user accounts, built in banners) or have a bunch of conditional layouts, I would go with Joomla.

Either will work. Both need to be tweaked a little for SEO.

Thanks for the info guys and gals. I am starting my blogging campaign soon and appreciate the heads up

My vote is for WordPress, but I'm pretty biased. With WordPress, the key to good SEO is all in the templates you use. Some have tons of useless clutter and markup, while others are sleek, lean and mean :-)

Sorry about the cross-post - are there other professional theme providers for WP than iThemes that are known to work well with SEO??

I go for Wordpress. =D

Wordpress Rocks No one beat Wordpress

Wordpress is awesome, but I like them both almost the same.

I vote learn html / css and build a proper website and integrate a wordpress blog but I know no-one is going to bother with that.

My HTML skills are archaic at best. Given my availability, it would be best to use an out of the box solution and eventually migrate. This will be an information type site based on a niche, so getting it up and ready with SEO is important.

Much thanks to all!

CW

wordpress is the best engine,
it is seo friendly, easy to use, many plugins and features.
most often used script..

Hi All,

Joomla is for a website that has many components (features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization), WordPress is for a simpler one, i.e., basic content management which also includes RSS and search capabilities.
Joomla is a little bit harder to learn so for the newbie, WordPress is the better choice.
You should first determine what functionalities you need to have on your website and then decide which to use based on that.