How to get articles etc to go where you want them with Joomla

I don’t know about other Joomla Newbie’s but I find the admin section very difficult to conceptualise.

I’ve been designing websites for ten years now, so my thinking is largely along the lines of containers within css, images, html and all the other stuff that goes to make up pages. Suddenly I’m presented with the totally different concept of user areas etc that Joomla uses.

I find it very difficult to know where these areas are and how to get my articles and images to go where I want them. I think in terms of page layouts - from my print and graphic design days, and I find that the Joomla documentation does not give me the handles I need to get hold of the way that things are done with Joomla.

After building a series of Joomla sites I think I'm getting the hang of how to arrange things. One of the first things I suggest is that new users seriously consider purchasing templates for their work. I resisted buying templates for a long time. Instead I modified the BEEZ template, totally changing its appearance by modifying the colours and layout. This was a LOT of work. This is one of the sites I designed that uses BEEZ in a modified form.

Buying templates is not expensive when compared to the amount of time I spent understanding the BEEZ template then finding out all the CSS specifications that were involved and changing each one of them. In addition I changed some of the layouts.

A commercial template at around $40 US is very reasonable.

I evaluated many free templates, they are all fairly restricted in what they offer, eventually I settled on templates from  Joomlashack.com and have used them on sites since, their terms are reasonable and you get good discounts when you purchase licenses for the same template that you already bought.