First off, I'm not a webmaster, far from it. But I have built a couple of websites for people over the years, pretty simple ones I built with textpad (& some kompozer) and some free css & javascript code I managed to copy, paste & get working ok.

I'm now looking to build a site for myself to showcase my new interest, which is aerial video & photography. I thought that this time I'll use a CMS system for a more professional looking site, and one that will be easier to edit, add content such as images etc, without having to muck around with the back end and ftp the new pages up every time I make a change.

I've tried playing with wordpress & Joomla 1.5 a few years ago, but wordpress didn't seem to be what I want and I just had a hard time wrapping my head around how a CMS works compared to a text based page. I know my way around databases as I'm an Oracle & MSSQL DBA in my day job.

I downloaded Joomla 3.0 and am seeing what I can create on my PC, which already has xampp installed. My site will be simple, a couple of pages with some descriptive text about what I do, and the ability to have several galleries to display photos & video.

At some point I may want to put in the ability to order images online and pay with paypal etc.

Then I asked our own Webmaster, who does our company site and he suggested I take a look at Concrete5, & showed me how editing is done "in page" which I thought was pretty cool, so I decided to have a look see here.

I downloaded C5 and installed in in xampp on my PC, other than having to create the mysql database manually the install went much the same as Joomla. I got it working with sample data and I must say at first glance the editing does look a lot easier with C5.

Now if I decide to go with this I'll have to see if my hosting provider (netfirms) supports it, but seeing how it has mysql databases I can't see why it wouldn't.

My other concern(s) are:

how many free templates there are, in particular templates that lend themselves to a photography site. Joomla has a gazillion of them it seems, but C5 not so much. (unless I'm not looking hard enough)

at some point I want a mobile site too, apparently joomla 3.x has that built in, in that whatever site I build will automatically adapt itself when viewed on a mobile device.

For a good photo-video showcasing site do you think C5 is the way to go? All suggestions are welcome..

thanks


ps. if anyone knows of good photo gallery templates out there that would be appreciated too.