How to create simple websites using Joomla?
Joomla is a very powerful content management platform. Its popularity has been on rise for the past couple of years, with many of the blog sites and other commercial sites adopting it as the platform of choice. If you are looking to start a website of almost any kind, Joomla might be your best answer.
Joomla is feature packed. While it makes the actual handling of Joomla easy, for a new user the number of features and the overall mechanism of understanding how the whole thing works would be very intimidating. If you are new to Joomla, you shouldn’t worry about how complex everything is in Joomla. To help you out, in this tutorial we will discuss how to build a simple website with Joomla. So read through to learn how to create simple websites using Joomla.
First Thing– have a plan
No matter, in which platform you are going to build the website, starting working on it without a rough plan, would be a very bad decision. Even the whole idea of just having a rough plan is not good enough. You should work hard towards establishing a finite plan as to how to work things out for the website. You should design the basic interface first. The overall design of the website would consist of what should be there on the home page, what pages should be included, which subpages etc. these things will slow you down a lot if you think that you would work these out as you build the website. There are some things which should be done right from the start because they should be there in the primary design of the website. In short, start with a plan and stick to it. Joomla is so well supported that whatever you have planned for the website would be there as a plugin in some community.
In the rest of tutorial we will discuss how one can build the basic pages with Joomla, like the basic article page and fill in categories and featured articles. The basic philosophy of Joomla is that everything in it is an article. So, let’s see how you can make a simple article page:
Making a simple Article Page
If you want to create an article in Joomla, all that’s needed is to go to the content drop down menu, and then to article manager and finally click add new article. Once you do that, you would get an editing box where you can put in all your text. You would also get options like making a word Bold, or Italic or any other sort of complicated formating with the article. You can also switch on features like putting tags for Search engines or working on the access of the articles. It is very simple build the overall page.
There are also simple options to create menu and other features which are usually found on a website. These articles actually get displayed directly in the homepage. You can also modify simple things and add specific pages for the article to be displayed.
Creating banners with Joomla
Another basic task with websites is creating banners for either displaying something important or showing an advertisement. You can get the option of banners from the ‘Components’ dropdown menu. There would be an option called banners, going to which you would be directed to place where you have to enter the details for the banner like Name, type and also the image which would be shown in the banner. You can also insert custom codes in the banners so that they would do specific tasks.
Joomla is a very easy platform to learn and do basic stuff. The whole point that you have to grasp is that it takes time and patience and a few experiments to finally arrive at the right conclusion.
