Working With Joomla – Guide For Newbie Web Designers!

Joomla is one of the best toolkits to make and build a website. Even designers, not by profession, can find it easy to manage the site. However, there are certain common mistakes that newbie designers commit and that start affecting the site negatively. Knowing the mistakes help the beginners to build secure sites that run for years after the built up. 

Not Planning Means Failure

Before starting with the web design, it's better to plan about how the design will fit into the digital strategy.

• Know about the role a website will have to play in the marketing plan of the business and interaction with the social media sites.
• The selection of the keywords to be incorporated into the website strategy is another important step. The keywords should be used in the body content, category, sub categories, and Meta tags.
• Security platform should be there to protect the site from hackers and keeps the website fresh and updated.  

How To Prevent Possible Problems?

• Don't add any feature that is not helpful for the end users. The main objective of features should be to convert the visitors into customers.
• Avoid direct typing in Joomla as it won't be saved due to very short session i.e., for 15 minutes.
• Avoid direct copying from MS Word to Joomla as it may crash the website due to messy code.

How To Keep The Site Clean?

• There should be consistency in the layout and images. There should be consistency in spacing and the image sizes.
• The file names should be descriptive to get more targeted traffic from Google.
• Text could be changed according to the available headings.
• All the outside links should open in a separate window. Inside links should open in the same window. For external links to be opened in new window, HTML editor should be used. It doesn't make the browser messy and let the visitors leave the site.
• Avoid underlining the text unless it's a link.
• Use HTML editor to hard code the links.  

How To Avoid Problems Related To Images?

• Joomla wont resize your images before uploading, so do it yourself to make the website loading fast.
• Images should be organized properly by using names as well as topic. Joomla will allow you to organize the images in separate, new folders.
• Don't put all the images in one big folder to avoid any hassle while finding them at some later stage. Joomla won’t allow this without accessing the media manager of the site.

Working with Joomla isn't tough to learn. Web designers just need to have the wish to learn, rest it's more dependent on practice. The more they practice using the latest approaches the more they will become expert. The above-mentioned points are good enough for the beginners of Joomla. If you are at the beginning stage in using Joomla, do consider them for coming up at excellent Joomla-based websites.