Some of our customers ask us “How long does it take for me to learn Joomla?” Of course, the first thing that you have in mind is how come these customers ask us about learning Joomla when they already have a Joomla website? Well, the thing is, there are many Joomla website owners out there who have outsourced all the work on their Joomla website to someone else (they just feed him the content and he’ll do all the work) – and all of a sudden that person left them, and now they want to learn Joomla so that they won’t fall in the same trap twice.
In any case, our immediate answer to their question is a question: “What is the level of your Internet expertise?” By Internet expertise we mean the experience of using the Internet – for example, searching/browsing, filling out forms, transacting online (buying and/or selling items online), understanding that the basic language of the Internet is HTML (which is read by all browsers), etc… We ask this question because the level of Internet expertise will allow us to accurately estimate how much time it’ll take someone to learn Joomla, a CMS of low-to-medium difficulty (depending on how it’s used) that is not that hard to learn.
If their level of Internet expertise is…
- Zero: It means that they don’t know how to browse, they don’t know how to search, they don’t know how to fill out forms, they don’t know how to do anything online without help from someone else. It’ll take about 3 months for these people to learn Joomla – because they first need to learn the basics of the Internet, and then they will need to learn the basics of Joomla (such as creating an article, creating a menu item, updating that article etc…).
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One: It means that these people are able to browse the Internet – but not much else. They don’t understand what are the constituents of a web page, and they don’t understand how the web works. It’ll take these people about 1 month to learn Joomla, where they’ll spend about 2 weeks learning the basics of the Internet, and then two weeks to learn the basic usage of Joomla.
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Two: It means that these people have a basic grasp of the Internet: they know how to do most of the things they need on the Internet such as searching, browsing, filling out forms, buying, etc… They don’t understand the technicalities of the Internet – but they can still use it. It’ll take about 2 weeks for these people to learn Joomla.
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Three: It means that these people know how to do nearly anything on the Internet – they are also comfortable with using any website regardless of its layout and its technology (they probably even have an ebay account). They have a basic grasp of how the Internet works and the language that powers the Internet, which is HTML. They are able to use technical terms to describe what they’re doing on the Internet. They know what can and what cannot be done (technically) on a website – and they’re confident that they can develop a personal website for themselves (or for their friends) or a website to support their small business. It’ll take these people about 2-3 days to learn Joomla.
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Four: It means that these people are very technical – maybe they have a programming background – but they haven’t operated a CMS based website before (or the other way around: they have operated a CMS before – but are not very technical). These people will be able to learn Joomla in one day.
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Five: It means that these people are programmers who have used a CMS before (they’ve probably even created one). It’ll take these people a couple of hours to understand how Joomla works. These people will then move quickly to learn the advanced features of Joomla, such as ACL, caching, modularization, and how to create custom extensions for Joomla.
As you can see, the amount of time it takes to learn Joomla depends on one’s Internet experience: it can range from a couple of hours for programmers with expertise in another CMS to 3 months for those who don’t know how to use the Internet.
If you want to learn Joomla then we can help you develop a study plan customized to fit your expertise. Don’t be shy, we all started from nothing – just contact us and we’ll take it from there!
Quick note: We won’t teach Joomla, there are many 3rd party companies that do that – but what we’ll do is that we’ll help you develop a study plan, so that you can start working on your Joomla website in no time!
Another quick note: The time estimates to learn Joomla above are for learning the basics of Joomla. For example, if you don’t know how to use the Internet then don’t expect to be a Joomla guru in 3 months!