Joomla!® 24-Hour Trainer

INTRODUCTION

AS A PROFESSIONAL WEB DEVELOPER, one of the aspects of my job that I love the most is how fast the field changes. I've often compared technology years to calendar years. Technology years are roughly equivalent to dog years. For each calendar year, seven technology years go by. If you feel your head spinning where technology is concerned, there's a reason why — it moves incredibly quickly!

When I started this career in 2001, after graduating with a master's degree in Internet Strategy Management from Marlboro College Graduate School, I built websites with Dreamweaver. I frequently built two versions of the site, one for Netscape and one for Internet Explorer. Making changes to websites was limited to the technically brave and knowledgeable. Most small businesses hired a developer to fix typos, change text, and add new pages to the site.

In 2001, content management systems existed, but they were generally proprietary, generally very expensive, and typically limited to very large websites.

In 2011, just 10 calendar years (or 70 tech years) later, we've seen the rise of social media, blogging, and alternative web browsing devices like mobile phones. Much of this new technology has been driven by the rise of the web application, and driving that has been the world of open-source software projects. As a result, small businesses, nonprofits, and other small organizations own reasonably priced websites in 2011 that would have cost between five and six figures in 2001.

Technology ...