I took the long 4th weekend to convert our site to Joomla!, an open-source content management environment.

It took about 12-15 hours overall, which is not bad for a total site conversion. The new site has all the features and information of the old, and we will begin to add a few new features, beginning with this site news features. We hope to use it to do a better job of staying in touch with customers, attracting new prospects, and managing the flow of information when projects and orders are in place.

A key difference of Joomla! and CMS in general is that a template is applied to the site, and this template is very extensive and largely independent of the content. The template in use now is okay, but it's the "out of box" Joomla! template, and I hope to work it over a bit to customize it for our company.