Ahh, Yes mike. Joomla and Mambo both fit into the Simple and Useful category. Although they are a little more powerful than WordPress which is also very good. For almost all my sites though I use either WordPress for smaller lightweight sites or PostNuke for more powerful sites. It's possible with either of these programs to make any kind of website you could want.

If you would like to advertise please PM me and I will point you in the right direction.

OP, the most important step to deciding what to use is specifying what is it you want to do! There are loads of different CMS's out there, each one scratches a particular itch. I use Drupal, but I wouldn't recommend it to somebody getting their feet wet as it has a high beginners learning curve.

Dreamweaver can be used in conjunction with a CMS, the two can complement each other.

If you plan on doing a lot of customization on your website, then you'll probably find yourself digging around with frontpage, dreamweaver etc.

If you plan on leveraging pre-built functionality from the open source community then you'll probably find yourself working mainly through the administration pages of your CMS.

It helps to know what it is you want to achieve. For a static site with little pages, Dreamweaver would probably be more useful (if you have it).

AFAIK Joomla can be quite bloated. Funnily enough, with a lot of websites it's not the CMS that slows it down, it's poor optimization on part of the web developers.

Things like gzipping the page contents, having all the CSS code in one master file(less HTTP requests), using CSS image sprites, loading javascript files at the bottom of the page, adding expires headers to jpegs etc and so on are very efficient and relatively simple ways of making pages load faster.

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