Joomla Newbie. Help!?
February 22, 2010 under FAQ
I am brand new to Joomla. I have installed Joomla on my Windows PC (xampp, Apache, MySQL, PHP). I have created just a sample site just to see if it works.
Now, I want to create professional visually stunning sites, and I’m stuck. I appreciate Joomla.org for providing this nice CMS, but I need more than what they offer. With the parameter-based CMS, it’s so cumbersome to get nice looking web elements that you want ready to use like tabs. Do I just need to install custom templates? Where can I get free Joomla templates that looks like nice. Please, give me some specific quality templates. I’m not looking for blog styles templates like with simple headers and tags written in various text sizes on the sidebar like on Wordpress.org. It’s so annoying. I’m looking for high quality visually stunning Joomla templates that have the visual presence as well as complex programming elements such as shopping carts using PayPal, opt-ins, user login form and database. Please help. Are there any free ones? I’m willing to pay if the prices are reasonable. Thanks.
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Hi
Joomla templates are pretty specialist in the way that they are made for Joomla, there are thousands of templates out there (free and paid) that will allow you to download. 99% of thetime you should be able to download a free template that you kinda like and make small alterations in the images.
The headings ect, this is what I do as I have no time to learn how to make the templates :))
all templates are located in the templates file so if you open the drive you are running Xampp go to:
?:/htdocs/templates/template_name/imag…
here you will find all the images that the tempate uses, change the heading images and any others that you want and then see how it looks, you can also remove areas from the template and change the css in te template manger by selecting the template and eiter edit css or html up the top.
I customise templates but not make them most of the time as there is normally a free template out there that will work for me.
hope this helps in some way
Frankly, I’ve been disappointed with most of the templates (both free and commercial) that I’ve seen.
I’m somewhat old-school in that I believe public-facing web sites (where you can’t make a lot of assumptions about your audience) need to allow users to turn off image downloads and javascript, resize the text without breaking, allow any content length without breaking, etc.
I generally end up creating my own, but it can be very time and labor intensive to get everything to work well and in a cross-browser way. (Which is probably why template farms generally don’t spend a lot of time taking their templates to a level I would call “robust” or “high quality”.)
As for complex programming elements, such as shopping carts, etc., these are plugin modules and not part of the template.
You should certainly poke around extensions.joomla.org if you have not already.