I am a newbie.

[HomeComputerGames]

My apologies, I'm back to thinking everyone deals with this stuff endlessly.

A program such as Joomla stores all of your information in a database. This is all of the text for each page, images, etc..

So anytime a person visits one of your website's pages the system has to get the information from the database. This puts a load on the server. If the load gets too be too much the server will slow down.
Static pages ( pages that are individually coded and do not use a database) are much more efficient as far as putting a load on the server. I have 145,000 products. Writing individual web pages for each product would be quite some task. So a content management system such as Joomla is best in my situation.

There will come a time when your traffic gets heavy enough to where the server can no longer handle the traffic. Then it is time for a move.

[rlugo29]

When you say server, do you mean the place I host my site (like godaddy)? Is there a thread or something that gives the meaning to a lot of the terms and acronyms that float around here?

BTW, no apologies needed. I actually prefer you use the big boy lingo as it forces me to ask questions and learn in the process.

[GregK]

I have to apologize for confusing you as well. Joomla can create a website in the sense that it will send all of your information to the right place, but it is not a design tool. You have to input the design you have into it which can be easy if you use a template, or fairly advanced if you have a site with mass customization.

[HomeComputerGames]

Originally Posted by rlugo29

When you say server, do you mean the place I host my site (like godaddy)? Is there a thread or something that gives the meaning to a lot of the terms and acronyms that float around here?

BTW, no apologies needed. I actually prefer you use the big boy lingo as it forces me to ask questions and learn in the process.

The server is the actual computer that your site is located on.
GoDaddy has many servers.....thousands I am sure. Many sites can be hosted on a single server. "Shared Hosting". You can also get a hosting account where you only share the server with a couple of people and you have some control over the server as if it was yours alone. "Virtual Dedicated"
And then you can rent a server all to yourself. "Dedictated Server"
I have a dedicated server with Godaddy and run several sites from it.
Finally there is co-locating. This is where you take your personally owned server down to an ISP where they put it in their server racks and hook it up to the Internet.
This is probably the most secure as you are the only one that can access this server. But it is also costly.

For any term that you are unfamiliar with you can use Google to define it.
Use "define:word" without the quotes where word is the word you want to look up.

[rlugo29]

Thanks for all the help. After further research, I have decided to use joomla as it looks like it will fit my needs. Best of all, there is a ton of tutorials, articles, and other helpful tools to get a new guy like me started. They also have a forum with lots of helpful people like you to walk me through things.