There is no doubt about it, Joomla is a very complex system to work with if you don’t have the proper training.

Time and time again I am hearing how people are just not happy with their Joomla website and they are not happy with VirtueMart (Joomla’s shopping cart).  Their complaints are the structures are just not user friendly when in reality, with the proper training Joomla and Virtuemart is not any harder to use than WordPress or 1Shopping Cart.

The problem is that Joomla comes with so many functions already enabled. People get lost. Once they understand that they can learn to create an article and manage it, then they can learn to move modules, etc, and that they can learn one thing at a time and not get confused by it all at once, Joomla starts to make sense.

Case Study

I met a fellow virtual assistant who had a Joomla site and she was ready to throw in the towel and move it to a WordPress website.  This is fine but she eventually wanted to give away things, have a newsletter and other things that could be accomplished with WordPress but she would either have to pay for these services or she would be using WordPress for something that it was never intended for which is a complex website and she would’ve eventually ran into problems.

She reached out for help and I answered her and spent two hours working with her (she basically needed a full education on how to use her site because her designer created the site, got paid and walked away, which is unfortunate) and she is now much happier with her website.

Her complaint was also that it was not user friendly but once I helped her understand how to do things to her website, she realized it’s really not that un-user friendly.

When you are not use to web design and shopping carts and how they work, whether you use WordPress, Joomla, 1Shopping Cart or Virtuemart, it can all seem overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.  All you have to do is reach out and find the right person who is willing to take the time and teach you.

With the fast-pace of your life, you may not want to learn something new and that’s fine but if you don’t take the time to learn, it can leave you frustrated and cost you a lot of money.  Even if you have somebody update the site for you, you have to pay them every time or if you try to learn things on your own without somebody in the background to help you out it will cost you in lost time and frustration.

So before you give up on something because you feel it is non-user friendly, reach out and find somebody who is willing to take the time to work with you and educate you because you may just find that you were just uneducated on the item.  Being uneducated can be detrimental to your business and cause great confusion.

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