If you get into running an online business, one of the challenges is getting your site or sites up and running. You can do it yourself or hire someone.

Once you get the hang of it, using a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla is pretty easy. But making templates can be a lot of work.

There are free templates out there, but unless you want to look like everyone else you’re going to want to customize. For example, I had to figure out how to customize a WordPress template to match the rest of my site for this blog. If you compared it to the original… well, you can see some layout similarities, but I changed it quite significantly.

But Joomla is tougher. I know. I’ve used it on occasion. It has advantages in some areas over WordPress and there are certainly valid reasons to use it. But it’s entirely different.

Once you go over the advantages and disadvantages of the different systems, if you choose Joomla you may want to consider this ebook that helps you with Joomla Templates. It includes 50 of them but also tells you how to make your own so that you really can stand out.

While I haven’t tried this ebook myself, I can tell you that once you get comfortable with a particular system, it generally turns out to be pretty easy and comfortable. And it’s so nice to not have to spend too much time on the design side of your websites if you don’t have to.