How to create a basic Joomla 2.5 website in next to no time

This short guide will teach you how to turn your newly installed Joomla 2.5 site into a basic three page website. The pages will be “Home”, “About Us” & “Contact Us”. It won't look particularly special but it'll provide the basics before you go onto improve the appearance.

Creating a basic Joomla site | Improving Appearance | Categories & Blog Layouts | Access Control Levels | Installing Extensions

To Begin

To begin, access the Joomla administration Login panel via a web-browser. Then enter your user-name and password and click on the login icon.

To preview your site at any time click on the “preview” link in the top right hand screen. This will open your live site in another page/tab.

Articles

Joomla sites are mainly constructed from articles. Our “home-page” will comprise of one article. To create it select Content > Article Manager from the main menu. Then click on the green new icon.

Give it a title (eg. “Home”) then from the section menu select “uncategorized”. Type whatever you want to appear as content in the main content box.

To add an image: first click at the appropriate image position, then click on image from the very bottom of the screen. Select the image from the folder selection (or browse and upload and then select) then click on insert at the top of the screen.

When you are happy with the content of your article, click on the top right-hand save icon. This will return you to the article manager.

Our “about us” and “contact us” pages will also be articles, so repeat this process for them.

The Menu

Now we need to create a menu with items that link to our articles. Joomla already has a pre-installed menu called “Main Menu”. To view it, return to the control panel and select Menus > Main Menu.

“Main Menu” already contains a menu item called “Home”, however it is the wrong type of menu item. To start from scratch tick the box next to the “Home” menu item then click on the trash icon at the top of the page. To create a new menu icon, click on the green new icon.

Select Articles > Article Layout.

Give the menu item a Title (eg. “Home Page”) then click on the Select Article button on the right.

Select the article you wish this item to link to (eg. “Home Page”).

Then click on the Save icon. Repeat this process to create a menu item that links to your “about us” and “contact us” articles.

All Done!

You now have a fully functioning basic three page web-site. You will not like the way it includes a title, your name and date on each page. You will not like the PDF, Print and email icons on the right hand side. You will definitely not like the imposing "Joomla" logo at the top of the screen. But all these elements can be rectified later.