Learning Joomla-How to Create Your Own Joomla Website in 7 Easy Steps

You can design Joomla websites in 7 simple steps, if you know how. Here, I will show you how to do just that. Following this simple system, you can start to create your own Joomla website in the next few days or hours, depending on your level of commitment and interest.

Here we go!

1. Learn Joomla Basics: Your first step to quickly and easily design your own high quality websites is learning the basics. These include how to install Joomla, setup Joomla SEF (search engine friendly) URLs, etc. This shouldn’t take you more than an hour to master and apply. Once you are comfortable with these, you are ready to create Joomla sites of your own.

2. Understanding Joomla Content Management System (CMS): The next step in designing Joomla websites is to learn how the Joomla CMS itself works. You should understand how the content hierarchy system works. These include the relationship between sections, categories and items/web pages in Joomla. You should also learn how to create or post any type of content (text, PDF, video, audio, graphics, etc) on your website under the right section and category. It will also be particularly useful for your to learn how to the tweak the content creation to score high with your Joomla SEO efforts.

3. Customize Joomla: You should also learn how to customize Joomla websites to fit your taste. You should learn how to modify Joomla templates as well as how to setup menus for both usability and maximum SEO benefits. Also, learn how to upload, install and modify Joomla extensions to boost the usability and interactivity of your Joomla website, etc.

4. Manage the Site: You can make your Joomla site as simple or as sophisticated as you want. It can be a simple personal portfolio site or a large community portal with all the bells and whistles that you can get. In either case, you should learn how to manage site users including how to upgrade, downgrade, block or even delete users, as the situation demands. You should also be able to setup interactive tools like polls and surveys and have a reliable means of communication setup between you and your site visitors and users.

5. Brand Your Joomla Website: You can also create custom footers, headers and graphics to create a unique theme for your website. (If you are not a graphic designer, that’s not a problem. You can outsource or buy them. You just need to know how to install them in the right places.)

If you want to go the extra mile and be a little more sophisticated with your Joomla website, you can install and customize Joomla extensions and scripts like a “Tell-A-Friend” type of tool or a “Recommend-A-Content” type of addons to make your site and content viral. There are other ways to do that I may teach you later on.

6. Joomla SEO: The Joomla CMS is setup in a way that it makes it very simple and easy to optimize your website for the search engines. Some of the benefits that the Joomla SEO system has include the ability to setup Joomla SEF (search engine friendly) URLs. You can also optimize the content sections, categories and pages for the maximum SEO impact. Off-page SEO is also very simple when you are using the Joomla software to design and develop your websites.

7. Think Smart and Joomla Security: Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are involved, in one way or the other, in designing Joomla websites. As a result, security risks and bugs are easily found and other webmasters alerted to it. You should stay up to date on whatever the latest risks and bugs that have been discovered and install the patches (fixes) so that your site does not remain vulnerable. And, remember that great Joomla development goes with one eye on the design and another on the security of your Joomla website.

Learning to design Joomla websites is not as hard as you may have been told. It is simple and straightforward, if only you know how or have the right learning resources at your disposal.