A little less than two weeks ago, despite having absolutely no programming skills whatsoever, I decided that I wanted to build my own website. (Yeah, I know, what was I thinking?!) After doing a bit of research I decided that I wanted to use Joomla, because it seemed to offer what I wanted (the ability to create a simple but good looking site) and because it was free!
The following is a general, non-technical overview of how I went about things, with a couple of concepts that were helpful to me when I was hacking my way through the Joomla jungle.
I got started by reading this: http://help.joomla.org/ghop/feb2008/task048/joomla_15_quickstart.pdf
(I strongly recommend that you work through it if you're building your own site!)
Joomla isn't a program that runs directly on your PC; it runs on a server, and the first thing this guide does is to walk you through setting up a local server on your PC so that you can get to grips with it before unleashing it on the world.
The guide also takes you through the basic things you can do with Joomla. You don't need to do all of these things on your own site, but it helps you to decide which features are right for you. For example, Joomla has a 3-tier hierarchy of how content is arranged - Section, Category, and Content. The guide tells you how to create a Section, then Categories within that Section, and then Content/Articles within that Category. On my site, however, I didn't need to use this hierarchy. All the pages, except the Blog, are simple uncategorized Articles. (This won't make sense if you haven't read the guide yet but it was an important breakthrough for me, and simplified the whole process no end when I grasped it.)
The guide shows you how to enter and organize your content, set up pages, create menus etc. The next step is to display this content in a good looking site which allows you to have all the functionality you want - for a musician this might include: a Home Page; a Blog Page; a Music/mp3 page; a gig calendar; a gallery; a contacts page, and so on.
How a site looks and functions depends upon the template. I had hoped that I could simply decide how these things would look on my site. Perhaps I wanted a particular title in a certain coloured-box in a certain position on the page, with an mp3 player below it, and a news feed at the bottom. It is possible to create a template to your specifications, but it's not possible unless you have good programming skills. (I've highlighted this because I wasted some time trying to figure out how to do it!)
What you need to do is to use a pre-designed template and fit your content within it in a way that looks good and works for you. There are loads of free and commercial templates out there, and lots of sites to help you install these into your Joomla site. When you're choosing, it's vital that the there's some information as to where the different modules fit into the template. (More on modules in a second.)
Have a look at this page: http://www.joomlart.com/templates_club/club_portfolio/ja_zinc.html
You can see a demo mock-up of a website using the template, and you can see that it shows where the modules go. It shows Main Navigation and Banner towards the top, Left at the left, User 3 at the bottom, and so on. These are all module positions.
To me, as a non-technical person, a module seems to have two slightly different meanings within Joomla (or at least to be used in these ways when you're reading about them). It can mean simply a box/place where you can put something e.g. text or a photo, or it can mean an application, e.g. in the template above the JA Slideshow module will be doing something to your photos, i.e. making them into a slideshow!
Now another eureka moment for me was realizing that you can show different modules on different pages of your site, and that you can put different content within the same modules on different pages. (You do the first bit in Module Manager in the edit page for the module, by choosing which menu page/s your module is published on in the Menu Assignment section.) Again using the example template above, on your Homepage you could decide to just have the JA Slideshow, the Left module containing the menu, and the Body containing the text (this is where any article content will default to). The empty, unused modules usually will not show. On your music page you might have different text again in the Body, but this time have an mp3 player in the Right module.
I can't go into all the details of this here, and there are loads of sites that do, but I hope you can see how this enables you to get something of the look and the functionality you're after, without needing to do any programming at all.
Once you get to grips with this, you can add lots of useful modules/extensions to your site. There are heaps of useful ones here:http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/clients-&-groupware/online-status-&-profile
You download and install the modules, follow the instructions, then position them in one of the module positions on your template and, voila, an mp3 player, or a slideshow, or a contact form, and so on. (OK, this doesn't always work as smoothly as that, but again there's lots of help out there :)
I know this blog is fairly non-specific, and that there are very many far more qualified people to help with Joomla issues, but if you're building your own site and I can be of any help to you, please get in touch!
Chris
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