Tutorial 1: Creating a W3C valid Joomla template for your Joomla website

In this series of articles, we'll be building a valid joomla template. Joomla is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that is freely (literally) available and supported by a large on-line community. The site will actually be live on-line from the very beginning, you'll be able to see the different stages as the design develops. As this is a CSS designed site, you'll be able to slowly see the raw joomla design get styled step by step.

In this article we will look quickly at installing joomla and then spend most of our time discussing the joomla doctype and how it relates to a valid joomla site. We'll also briefly look at how to construct a basic or blank joomla template with the index.php file.

So we are about to begin design the site for real, but first we need a few tools. Now, everyone probably has their own favorites, but here is a list I have been working on of all the tools you will need to design a site. The good part? They are all free for the downloading.

In an earlier section, we discussed a slightly different design process. Instead of creating the design and then doing the CSS layout, we will be doing it the other way round, the Joomla CSS first. We are doing this because we want to make an blank CSS template file that can be reused by anyone.

In this joomla tutorial, we will look at a 3 column theme for your joomla website. Most joomla websites use 3 columns and having the theme start with that is a good foundation. Then later we can hide side columns if there is no content in them for that page.

So we have a very basic shell of a web site. Doesn't look very interesting does it. Well, we can soon change that, let's make a few changes. We will also optimize the template for SEO. Joomla has some challenges compared to a static website, but techniques such as those we describe here can improve your joomla SEO efforts.

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IndicJoomla in tamil
written by STM , मई 19, 2007

hello I have a small partial translation in tamil for IndicJoomla, so if you want to get it, send me msg
bye.

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