Learn How to Design and Manage Joomla Websites

As a beginning Joomla web designer, it may seem at first that the Joomla CMS software is very tough to understand. But that may not be entirely true. Here’s a proven Joomla website design and development formula that takes the guesswork out of it and enables you to start creating your own Joomla websites in no time.

Alright, let’s start counting, shall we?

• Buy Domain: Unless you plan on creating your Joomla site on a subdomain (subdirectory) of an existing website of yours, you should go ahead and register the domain name that you want to use for your website. This shouldn’t cost you more than $10 per year to maintain it.
  

• Joomla Web Hosting: If you don’t already have a “Joomla-friendly” hosting account, you should go ahead and setup one for yourself. The right Joomla host may even give you access to the tools that could allow you to semi-automatically install Joomla on your website. Most web hosting providers nowadays provides some compatibility with Joomla or provides you with tools to make your Joomla web design and development simple and pain-free.

• Install Joomla: Whether you want to create your Joomla website on a subdirectory of an existing site or design it on a new and specially created domain, the next step in your Joomla development process is to install the Joomla software on your website to start working on the site.
  
  There are at least two ways to go about the Joomla installation: You can either use the “Fantastico” or other feature available to you from your (Joomla web hosting) account’s “Control Panel”. Or, you can upload the Joomla software and follow the provided instructions to install it in 5 minutes or less.
  
  Either way should work well and get your Joomla development working just fine and in no time.

• Design and Develop Joomla: Once the installation is successful and out of the way, the next thing you should do is to start planning out the content structure, layout, theme, Joomla menus and overall look and feel of your website. This is when you have to decide how to customize Joomla and make your site unique, interactive, user-friendly and content-rich.
  
  Therefore at this stage, you should start creating your content sections, categories and items/pages. You should also setup Joomla SEO so that your site ranks high in the search engines and get your more traffic and hopefully more subscribers and sales.
  
  This is also the time to start installing and editing Joomla templates to create a theme for your website.

• Promote: Once you have setup the layout, theme and content of your Joomla website, the next step you want to take is to work a little more on your SEO for the site. You can (and should setup) Joomla SEF (search engine friendly) URLs to make your web links readable and easily recognizable by humans as well as woo the  search engine robots as they will take this into consideration when ranking your website.
  
  You should also, at this point, submit your site to the top search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. You may also want to submit your website’s pages to the various social bookmarking sites out there like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. This will help you get more readers, subscribers and huge one-way backlinks from these sites to yours absolutely free!
  
  You can learn how to DESIGN JOOMLA websites in the next 24 hours or less by downloading YOUR COPY of the Joomla tutorial videos available at http://www.JoomlaWebsitesUnleashed.com . Do let me know if you have any further questions or need more help afterward. See you there!    :)

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