Do it yourself is not as scary as it sounds. It you need or want a website, there is a fairly simple way to get a professional website quickly.

CMS, or content management system, is just a fancy name for a website in a box. You push a button or two, and your web host installs it for you (if you’ve got a good web host) and in the space of thirty minutes you can install a generic website that gives you working email, dependable page navigation, image handling and control, and more.

What this means is that in a tiny amount of time, anyone can set up a website that is very professional-looking, and has many features. Then with a few hours of customization you have a website that is capable of doing almost anything you want it to do.

Joomla

Joomla is a CMS that is free and open-source. Anyone can download it, install it, and use it. Joomla has a long history and a huge user community that makes it a very safe option to install and use. Joomla can be customized to present a picture gallery, add comments, or be a business website with a shopping cart. It is a general purpose package that, once set up, can be made to do almost anything. Joomla is an excellent choice if you want to pop up an entire website, put your energy or your money into customization, and in the space of a week or less have something you can be proud of.

Joomla is not hard to use, although it will take you a few hours of reading the extensive documentation, to understand how to use it. There are many resources on the web that will explain anything about Joomla. Or you can go to their excellent and active forum for support. One of the resources that describes both installation and customization of Joomla is Website-Do It Yourself.

Customization

One of the first things you want to do to customize your site is change the template. There are many free templates out there that you can download to your computer and upload to your website – and you immediately have a new appearance. The colors can be changed, the format of the page (columns, inserts) can be changed, any of the page details can be changed.

Once you’ve chosen a template that you like, you can change the logo picture at the top of the page. Since that logo image will automatically be used on every page, it is very powerful at defining your site.

Joomla also has many third party plug-in modules that add functionality to your site. Almost all these things are free. For example, you can change the editor to one you like better, you can add advertising modules to the sidebars, you can add security modules that prevent spam, and the list goes on into hundreds of additions.

In conclusion, Joomla is absolutely the best choice you could make to create a unique and beautiful website. It’s CMS at its best – functional, customizable, free, quick to install, and well-documented.

weddings

If you build WordPress blogs in general, most likely you will have searched online for themes. Finding free themes that have exactly what you are looking for can be quite the challenge. When I first started out however, I used free themes since I didn’t have a large budget. The following are some places to check out if you are looking for quality themes.

The first site I recommend is looking at is wpfreethemes.com. They have a ton of themes from a large number of categories, and many of them are very high quality. WP themes also gives you the chance you to search for themes according to various categories, such as the niche, number of columns, and by color. One downfall to using WP themes is that you aren’t allowed to do any customization to any of the themes.

Another site to visit that offers free WP themes is smashingmagazine.com. They list hundreds of free WordPress themes that are very professionally designed, with high quality graphics and have some element of customization to them as well. They researched and tested all these themes, so you know they have good quality.

While free themes are ideal if you have a small budget, the disadvantage is the limited ability to customize them to suit your needs. Finding ones that have exactly what you are looking for isn’t easy, which is why buying or creating your own themes is ultimately the way to go in the long run. Doing so will also save you a lot of time having to search for free ones.