Create your own website for free with Joomla!
There are several ways to create your own website. Certain enthusiasts still do it with computer languages such as HTML or PHP. But there are also programs that allow building a website without learning programming. Joomla! is a popular example of this.
What is 'Joomla!'
Joomla! www.joomlanl.com and www.joomla.org is an open source program. This means that it is not commercial and for that reason, among other things: free to use. Open source software also offers everyone the opportunity to make additions to the program themselves, in order to improve it in that way.
Incidentally, the makers of Joomla! whether these additions are really an improvement, so that users do not end up stuck with a large but poorly functioning program. Joomla! is the second most popular online website creation software after WordPress.
DIY on the web
With Joomla! you can create your own website relatively easily. Most importantly, it keeps things simple by using one of the many thousands of sample website templates already available on the web. A template offers you all the design of the different web pages: complete with colors, font styles, layout for texts and images and menus.
After installing a template, you often only need to replace the sample texts and images with your own. So you no longer have to think up and make the web design completely yourself and you will soon have a website up and running. Incidentally, it is often possible to adjust the properties of a template to your taste. For example by choosing other colors. There are several providers of templates for Joomla! on the internet: both free and paid. The paid templates are often more intended for commercial websites. Visit Joomla web development India
The button table: the Content Management System
In addition to building a new website, you will also want to regularly adjust the content of your existing website. For example to post news or new photos. With a conventional website in HTML, you often spend a lot of time making the changes because you have to change the code. Joomla! However, it is a Content Management System (CMS). The special thing about a CMS is that you can easily adjust the content of a website, without having to program.
A CMS ensures that you add and adjust information on your website using links and input boxes, among other things, without having to change anything in the code. The content of the website is separate from the appearance, while this is usually mixed together in the code with websites. That makes adjusting a lot more difficult.
A new coat
At Joomla! the content is stored in a separate database (database) of the type MySQL. The content of a web page is then only retrieved and filled in when someone visits this page on the Internet. The result is that the CMS website ultimately looks just like a traditional website made in HTML.
Another handy feature of this system is that you can adjust not only the content but also the appearance of your website easily and quickly by choosing a different theme. The content is not affected by this, so you can quickly give your website a whole new coat.
A major advantage of Joomla! is that in addition to templates, you can also embellish your website with additional parts: also called components. Think of forms, calendars, guestbooks, and so on. With the help of these extra components it is even possible to add complete applications such as an online store to your site.
When adding these extensions, it is of course important that you keep viruses or other malicious software at bay. Therefore, it is wise to only use components listed on the official Joomla! website: www.joomla.org .
What do you need
There are a few things you need to do before you can build a website with Joomla!:
- Web space for your website with a domain name (web address for your website, such as www.mijnwebsite.com ). For a few euros per month you can go to the many web hosting companies out there. It is useful to make sure that the hosting provider takes Joomla! into account. This will then provide good support for the available templates and other components. Joomla! uses the PHP language to work, so check beforehand whether a hosting provider is using the correct version.
- A MySQL database that stores the website content. This is made available by the hosting provider and is usually immediately available from Joomla! support providers. Also make sure that the correct version of MySQL is available.
- A program to extract Zip files, such as WinZip or WinRAR. The Joomla! package is delivered compressed in a Zip file.
- An FTP program to upload files to your web space. For example the free program FileZilla: http://filezilla-project.org .