Packt Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide 380pages software manual

Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide - Create a web site that meets real-life requirements by following the creation of an example site with the help of easy-to-follow steps and ample screenshots
- Practice all the Joomla! skills from organizing your content to completely changing the site's looks and feel
- Go beyond a typical Joomla! site to make the site meet your specific needs
- Get to grips with inspiring examples and best practices and implement them to enhance your Joomla! site

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web sites that perfectly fit your needs.

This practical guide gives you a head start in using Joomla! 1.5, helping you to create professional and good-looking web sites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club web site or build a personal blog site.

The Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich web sites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. It gives you a head start and explains what's good and useful about Joomla! features and what's not. The focus is on clear instructions and easy-to-understand tutorials, with minimum of jargon. This book provides clear definitions, thoroughly covering the concepts behind the software and creating a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do—it's about what you can do using Joomla!.

This clear, hands-on guide to building web sites helps you to get the most out of Joomla! 1.5's many powerful features.

<b>What you will learn from this book :</b>
- Create a feature-rich site that's easy to expand, customize, and maintain without having to learn web languages such as HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Design attractive home pages that provide a quick overview of the site's contents and direct people to the content they could be interested in
- Engage your web visitors and turn them into active users by enabling them to register, add content, and leave comments
- Design clear and easy navigation using menus, submenus, and text hyperlinks
- Make full use of templates to get your site to look just right, tweaking the CSS and customizing templates using your own logo, fonts, and colors
- Extend Joomla!'s capabilities by finding and utilizing must-have extensions that perfectly meet your needs
- Increase your site's visibility for search engines by applying highly effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques
- Secure your site from hackers and potential threats using easy-to-follow techniques

<b>Who this book is written for</b>
If you want to build and maintain your own web site, the Joomla! Beginner's Guide is perfect for you. It helps you build on the skills and knowledge you may already have on creating web sites—but even if you're new to this subject, you won't have any difficulty understanding the clear and friendly instructions and explanations. You learn how to build and maintain web sites without having to dive deep into HTML and CSS.