Alright you are ready to create a web site but you are not sure if Joomla is the right software for you to use. Luckily the community and volunteers at Joomla have come up with some ideas on how you can learn if Joomla is right for you.

The first thing you will want to do is learn what Joomla is, which you can get an overview of at:
http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html

They have a great explanation about what kinds of sites are built with Joomla including:

• Corporate Web sites or portals
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
• E-commerce and online reservations
• Government applications
• Small business Web sites
• Non-profit and organizational Web sites
• Community-based portals
• School and church Web sites
• Personal or family homepages

and they list some example sites including:
http://www.ihop.com/
http://www.greenmaven.com/
http://www.crosscreektexas.com/
http://www.kbconnor.com/
http://lompocvmc.com/
http://www.childrensmiracle.net/
and many more. To check out a full list of their example sites you can see them at:
http://community.joomla.org/showcase/

First off for the absolute beginners in our audience we recommend that those persons first check out the Absolute Beginners Guide to Joomla.

Next we recommend that our customers check out  a page on Joomla's site which the Joomla community recommends that  you read about evaluating Joomla for your web site project. This page describes some of the things you can do and can expect from Joomla and why it may be right for your web site project. You can view this "is Joomla right for my project" at:
http://docs.joomla.org/Evaluators

Joomla also features a demo site that they have built and which they have included tons of helpful information describing what Joomla is and can do for your web site project. You can view their demo site at:
http://demo.joomla.org/1.5/

You can also read a 3rd party evaluation of Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress which suggests that Joomla is the most favorable of the 3 most popular open source software programs for building web sites. You can find this study at:
http://community.joomla.org/videos/marketing/osscmsreport2009r1.pdf
We do feel that we should warn our visitors that this study can be a little "yawn" lengthy especially for our less technical clients.