At Hot Sand we use a content management system to build many of our best websites, this system is called Joomla! The exclamation mark is part of the name, its not just me being enthusiastic! (that one was mine).

Joomla! is an open source system, meaning that the source code is freely available for hundreds of thousands of Joomla! users the world over to contribute to, and suggest changes and improvements.  

This means that the system is constantly improving, and is an extremely stable and simple system to use.

Using Joomla! allows us to create websites, that are easily maintained and updated by yourself, this saves your time (and money!).  We offer training and 3 months support after your site goes live, so you will have us on hand to answer your questions and give you some tips on how to make the best use of your new website.

If you visit the 'websites' section of our site you will find some examples of sites we have created using Joomla!, and you can see for yourself how impressive they are!

What you can’t see from these examples is how easy it is to update your own website, which is what this blog post will aim to show.  It is not meant as a comprehensive guide, and is only meant to show how simple the creation of new material for your website is, creating new menu items (which are sometimes required to access your material) will not be covered in this article.

After logging in to your Joomla! Site, you will be presented with the following menu:

All of these sections will enable you to change pretty much anything about your site, but the one we are interested in is the 'Add New Article' button, (top left).  If you click this it will then take you to the following screen:

This is the main edit screen, it is where you will do most of your article editing and writing.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the aspects of the system you will need to use.  Any good article has a title, and this is what you should enter in this box (It is important that you give it a name relevant to the content on the page as this is the first thing Google sees).

The alias section is completed automatically (it arranges your article name so it is suitable for use in a web address).  The section box is used so you can split articles into different categories, and for example, have them appear on specific areas of your site. This blog for example, is situated within the 'blog' category of the Hot Sand website.

The next step is to create your content.  There are a number of ways to do this, but the best way is to type it directly into the editor the image below shows you this editor, and how it is laid out.   To those of you familiar with word processing applications such as Microsoft Word, the tools will mostly be familiar, and act in the same way as they do in the popular desktop applications.

Buttons are included to create tables, to format text, to insert images, and all the other tasks that you would need to complete whilst constructing your website content.

Once you have finished creating your content, you can then use the parameters box to add information such as, author details, who can see the post (access details) and when you want the post to appear on your site.

This feature can be used to post time sensitive information, such as offers, or job listings, that need to be removed on a certain date.  With this, the post will become inaccessible on your chosen date and time, though it will still exist on your system if you want to re-publish it.

The penultimate step is to make sure the 'Published' radio button is set to yes, (Front Page asks you if you want the post to show on the home page of the site).  After this is complete there is only one more thing to do!

Finally you need to click 'Save' in the top right hand corner, the button looks like the above screen shot, once this is done, your page will be published!

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peak at a Joomla! system, and see how easy it is to create content for your website yourself! Look out for more quick looks like this in the future.

Tom