Creating a website with Joomla 1.5

In this tutorial we will show you how to add the basic types of pages to your Joomla website. After reading this tutorial you will have a working dynamic website with an About Us page, Contact Us page and a Poll. If you don't have a Joomla website yet, you can get a free professional Joomla installation with your Joomla Hosting account at SiteGround.com.

This tutorial covers the following topics:

• Logging into the Joomla admin area
• Creating Articles in Joomla
  
• Creating a Contact us page
• Linking Articles to the Menu
• Creating a Poll in Joomla 1.5

Logging into the Joomla admin area

After having Joomla 1.5 installed on your account, you can begin adding your content. In this example we'll assume that your domain is your_domain_name.com. Thus the Joomla's admin panel will be accessible at:

http://your_domain_name.com/administrator

Please make sure you change your_domain_name.com to your actual domain name when following this tutorial.

To log in to your Joomla admin area, enter your login information in the Joomla! Administration Login screen:

Creating articles in Joomla 

If you have installed Joomla through Fantastico or from source with the sample data, you will already have a few articles created and published. You can take a look at how they are written and organized in order to get used to managing your articles. To see them go to Content > Article Manager from the top admin menu.

There you will see several articles listed. Once you click an article link, you will enter the Edit mode for the article. From the Edit menu you can modify the article's title, text, etc.

Before building your first article, let's remove all default articles to avoid confusion. For this purpose go back to Content > Article Manager from the top admin menu.

Then select all articles by checking the first radio button in the column and click on the [Trash] button from the top admin menu. 

Now let's create your first article which we'll call "About us".

Step 1. From the top admin menu click on [New]. 

Step 2. Then make the following changes in the corresponding fields:

Title: About us
Alias: (leave it blank)
Section: Uncategorized
Category: Uncategorized
Published: Yes (If the article is not published, it will not be shown to your visitors. It will remain only as a draft.)
Frontpage: Yes (This will allow it to appear on the first page of your site.)

In the main text field write some information about your company...

Step 3. You can also insert your company's logo. For this purpose click on the image icon at the bottom of the page: 

: 

 Step 4. Since your logo is not uploaded yet, click on the [Upload file] link to upload it. Browse your local computer and find the logo image. Click on [Start Upload] to upload it. 

Step 5. You will see a confirmation that the file has been successfully uploaded. Now it can be found in the upper part of the window along with the default Joomla images. Click on logo.png (or whatever the name of your logo is) to select it and then on [Insert] to insert it in your article.

The logo's position in the article can be easily adjusted by dragging the image.

  Step 6. The last step is to save this article by clicking on the [Save] button.