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So you want to build a Joomla Website…
by Tiara Rea
I’m one of those people who likes talking about making money and visitor communication online, so most of my articles here at dart-creations.com are in regards to the methods necessary to bring people to your website, interact professionally with them, and make money doing it! Because honestly, if you’re starting a website, odds are you are not just building a personal blog or family photo album – you want to build a niche marketing site where customers from all walks of life and all countries around the world can come to buy your products, see what you have to offer, or just make you a superstar.
Well, I’ve already gone over using RSS Feeds to bring potential customers and readers to your website and using Surveys to keep those customers happy, but now I’d like to talk about actually building your website and managing the content efficiently (not to mention making the website look pretty as well).
 Using Joomla can be both one of the best and worst things you can do as a webmaster in this regard. Joomla is incredibly powerful and can literally transform your website from a piece of junk to a marketing guru’s dream…but if you don’t know how to use it or what to use to compliment it, odds are you won’t get very far. So here are a couple of tips to use when working with Joomla Core and affordable Joomla extensions to manage the content on your website more effectively.
Using Joomla Core – The Easy Way!
As I’ve been saying, Joomla can be hard to understand if you’re not well-versed in its language, so let’s go over some of the simplest ways to publish your content and make it look good to boot. Unfortunately, making Joomla look pretty without an extension installed can often be tough, so here are 2 of the easiest ways to customize its look.
1. Change the Layout of the Frontpage By editing the frontpage of your Joomla website, you have full control over what shows up and what doesn't. This is a good and easy way to give the frontpage a more pleasing appearance.
First, navigate to Menu > Main Menu and edit the “Home” menu item by clicking on the item titled “Home”.
From there, you have many different options to edit how your frontpage shows up. For example, you can edit the columns on the frontpage by editing the “Columns” parameter.
The "frontpage" doesn't have to be the first thing people see, though, which brings me Tip #2:
2. Change the Homepage
Since Joomla automatically uses the first menu item under the Main Menu as the first thing to show on your website, you literally have full control over what that happens to be. For example, I’m going to transform my Joomla website from the basic news portal it shows up as to an image-based magazine.
First, when logged in, you’ll need to create a new Section (Content > Section Manager > New) and a new Category (Content > Category Manager > New). Then, you’ll need to create the actual piece of content you want displayed by going to Content > All Content Items New. For me, I wanted an article with photo to show up for a pleasing Homepage image:
This is one of the great things about Joomla – it’s all WYSIWYG editing, so what I’ve typed and inserted above is just how it will look on my website. Once you’ve saved your work, make sure to set your new piece of content as “1” in the list of content items and then save your order.
Then, visit Modules > Site Modules > New and Content > Frontpage Manager, where you will finally set your Module as the first thing visible for your audience to see as in the screenshot above by putting a numeric value in the box as “1”.
Seem like a long process? It gets shorter the more you work with Joomla, and trust me, it will do the trick! Here’s the new version of our homepage:
Joomla Extensions That Can Help
Finding you can’t keep up maintaining and editing Joomla in the ways I’ve outlined or those you’ve found on your own? Yeah, Joomla isn’t pretty in its default state, so to help manage the physical layout of your website, I always recommend a couple different tools to people who ask for my opinion.
If you have a couple bucks to pay for extensions, I highly recommend iJoomla.com’s Magazine or News Portal extensions. While you can use both, let me go over some of the differences and why you’d want to buy one over the other.
This extension is definitely the most effective if you’re looking to build an attractive website and more effectively manage the layout and design of your Joomla site. While it was created to accommodate online magazines, many customers (including iJoomla.com themselves!) use the Magazine Extension for creating a better looking website in no time. With iJoomla’s Magazine Extension, you have 12 possible basic layouts to choose from for your main homepages – for each homepage, you can then choose a different layout if you need:
Each layout, as you can see, places elements of your website in different locations, something that, as you can tell from the tutorials above, is extremely hard if you’re just working with Joomla core. So if you want the main image centered or aligned to the left or right, you have full control of that. Plus, you can also edit the number of columns and rows in each zone and display them at your convenience. And if you’re HTML or CSS-savvy, you can actually build your own layouts by reconfiguring the ones in the Magazine Extension. Working with Joomla builds up your designing skills, so don’t think this is beyond your future!
Plus, adding content to your layout is a breeze. After you’ve written it and stored it as a content item, you can choose where it will be displayed and can mix and match which content items go where. With iJoomla Magazine’s Content Wizard, you can add each section, magazine, or category and content, view each immediately, save time and effort, and create your website in seconds. It really makes designing a website in Joomla as easy as you can imagine. Take a look at these screenshots to see what kinds of websites are possible with this amazing software:
This is another product from the folks at iJoomla, so it’s another extension you have to purchase, and it actually serves a slightly different purpose than the Magazine Extension.
The News Portal extension is built specifically to help you manage the next CNN.com. If you want to run a website where the primary goal is showcasing news in a way that is fluid and functional, the News Portal extension is for you.
The benefits to News Portal are tenfold, but one of the biggest is that you can use existing content and edit it in sections, categories, or content items. The newest news items automatically display at the top and flow down as more news comes in. Layouts are fully-customizable, even if you don’t know HTML or CSS (but if you do, that’s a bonus!). Featured stories and categories, updated date and time, and 3 module positions make working with News Portal easy and efficient.
The best part, content management wise, is that iJoomla New Portal’s Advanced Style Control System was made for those of us who aren’t CSS gurus. In the Advanced Style Control System, you have total style control without HTML knowledge and you can manage every aspect on your website easily to change fonts, colors, margins, borders, etc, with all changes visible immediately on your website.
Hopefully some of these tips will help you get started with your new website and keep the content coming! I really recommend an extension to help manage your website, so take a look at iJoomla’s Magazine and News Portal extensions. Trust me; they are worth the small price you pay to own them forever.
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Joomla 
