Setup a new site in Joomla

If you decide to go with Joomla what’s the best way to set up a new site?

Here’s my view after trying set up sites in different ways.

As I see it there are two ways . . .

• Do a clean install of Joomla and install the test data
• Do a clean install of Joomla but leave out the test data

Which is best and why?

When you first start with Joomla you have no idea what things like sections and categories are, why they are useful and how they link together. After a couple of weeks I’m still wondering too, so don’t get discouraged. If you let the installer put in the test data you will have a fully-populated working site. Great you may think. But you would be wrong.

Wrong because you don’t know how it all hangs together and that’s because you didn’t build it yourself. That means you don’t know what the bits are and how they fit together.

Compare that with an ‘empty’ install of Joomla.

In this case there is nothing. I mean nothing there, when you visit your site all you will see is the heading and a title. That’s great.

Great because you will have to read the tutorial and start building from scratch. There’s nothing like reading the documentation and doing what you are told to make you remember and understand.

Just do it that way and you will understand and make real progress.

First task was to set up a default Joomla installation - what’s that you may ask?

It’s what you get when you download the latest version of Joomla, then install it. When you do that you get whatever the defaults are in terms of page layout, colours etc. This is the starting point.

A few obvious questions . . .

• how do you add things
• change the stories that are there
• customise the images
• remove whole columns
• change the menus

We will start examining these things next.