|
Joomla comes with several default templates when you install a Joomla website. In addition, a very wide variety of templates are available for you to download and add to your Joomla site. Many of these templates are available at no charge. These designers offer their templates in the hope that you might hire them to design a custom template for your website.
Besides hiring the template design out, you can also work on making your own template. There are several ways to go about this and we will discuss the process and benefits of each.
Customize existing Joomla template
With the large collection of free templates at your disposal, it is quite possible that you can find a template design that appeals to your ambitions for your Joomla website. Editing an existing template to meet your exact requires can often be achieved quite smoothly. The ease of template customization often depends on how the original template was constructed as well as your familiarity with HTML and PHP. In many cases, you simply must identify the major graphics in the template and replace them with your own images sized to the dimensions of the original images. This will result in a modified template that retains all of the attributes of the initial design that you found appealing with the addition of your own site specific graphics. Additional customization can be done by changing the template colors or background images. You can go even further by editing the Cascading Stylesheet for the website, which controls the fonts, point size, colors, and many other visual elements used throughout the Joomla website.
Template Download resources
Creating a Joomla template
If you are unable to find a template from which to work from, it may be more advantageous to design a template from scratch. This is not as difficult a process as it might sound. Helpful tools for designing Joomla website are available as extensions for Dreamweaver, Golive, and NVU as well as other HTML editing tools. These extensions help automate and simplify the process of creating your own template design. In addition, several step by step tutorials are available on the web to walk you through the process. NVU's Joomla extensions even create the template directory structure and basic files for you making the process as simple and friendly as possible. After the basic template design has been created you will want to create your site's CSS files. You can either create these from scratch as well, or you may prefer to copy the completed CSS files from another template. In this manner, you have the particular layout and graphics you require for your site and can save effort and time by making some adjustments to an existing CSS file.
|
