Which Website Application?

It all started with my cycling club that ditched its previous Joomla site and started a brand new website using WordPress.

I’d previously worked with Joomla editing my local church’s website and had developed my main site of cycling journeys using basic HTML and CSS, which I still prefer in that it gives you complete freedom provided you know what you’re doing. The downside is that every page has to be edited individually. They have no shared content, so if you alter a menu it has to be changed on every page, and if you have dozens of pages you’re to take some time doing it. That is why on my HTML/CSS site I’ve grouped pages together into subjects and used different menus, so that I only have to edit a few pages if I change anything affecting that group.

Joomla is very good provided you have some experience with HTML and CSS. It gives you pretty much complete freedom while allowing you to create building blocks that you can use on multiple pages without having to edit each page individually. For instance: a menu used on a group of pages can be edited once and it will be promulgated to all those pages in a single operation. Joomla is different from WordPress in that it allows you to get at the HTML and CSS code behind the site and so in some ways it could be described as being more flexible, but you have to be careful with such descriptions.

So what about WordPress? If you are used to using a word processor such as Microsoft Word or Libre Office you’ll know that you can use styles to modify the look of what you’re typing, but without having any idea of the code behind. Indeed, you can’t get at the code (unless you open the document in a text editor, but that’s another story). WordPress is like that: you don’t need to know what it’s doing under the hood. You can modify the styles just like a word processor without having to look at the CSS.

However, just look at the size of the output from all three types. On the left I’ve put three images of the same webpage: the top is WordPress, the second is Joomla and the bottom image is pure HTML/CSS.

Which do you think is the most efficient?