Believe it or not, I successfully completed my Joomla website yesterday. Well, I guess that depends on your definition of successful. Anyway, my book-loving-self decided to create a website for a fake book store in the heart of New Orleans' French Quarter. This fake book store is on the beautiful Rue Royale (Royal Street), for those of you that have visited the French Quarter before. Going along with the personality of New Orleans and my own personal interests, I "created" a bookstore that features paranormal, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy books.
When it came to designing the actual website, I ran into a few problems in the beginning. For instance, the video tutorials provided by Joomla and Site Ground seemed very helpful. However, when attempting to follow the step-by-step process, I found that some times I could not duplicate what the instructor was doing since I was using a demo version instead of a paid version. Unfortunately, it took a bit of time, and quite a bit of frustration, to figure out how to change my website's name and how to remove the sample Joomla data that was on my website from the start. However, once I finally figured out some of the basics, I felt somewhat better. Feeling slightly relieved and less stressed, I began downloading extensions and creating content.
Two extensions were very helpful throughout the process: JCE editor and Akeeba. Akeeba backed up my work and JCE gave me far more extensive options for editing the content articles than the Joomla demo version did originally. As I created content, I created a category for each main menu item on my website. Being able to add all of my articles from one category into a menu item at once saved time and potential frustration. One of the demo's features that I utilized in the articles was the "read more" feature, which showed a teaser of information. This feature allowed visitors to the website the option of whether or not they wanted to read the entire article. I found this feature to give the site a more professional and less cluttered look.
Once the content was complete and I began to play around with the template once again. I became frustrated with the template in the beginning and set it aside to create the bulk of the website. Doing so was a smart decision. By the time all of my information was successfully uploaded onto the site, I was more comfortable with Joomla and was able to change the color and fonts on the site.
If you want to see the site, check out https://librarylady.demojoomla.com/. Websites are always a work in progress, but what you see is what I was able to do with a CMS in less than a week's time.
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