What is Joomla? Simply put, it is a free web-based content management system (or CMS).  It allows you to organise and update your website content using just a web browser - without needing to know any of the technicalities behind the scenes, such as HTML (the language used to create web pages).  Why is it free?

Joomla is an "open source" product.  This means that you do not have to pay for the software, and all of the "source code" is freely available to everyone.  Normally, a commercial program is sold in an "executable" form only - you can run the program, but you cannot change what it does or see how it was built.  With an open source product, anyone can tinker with the workings of the program, and customise it to do what they want, or add new features to it for their own purposes.

The Joomla community is so vibrant that you can get free technical support for Joomla just by using the discussion forums.