Article previously published on Authors Electric
I’ve been burning the midnight oil, designing and building a
new website which has to go online before the 21st of this month. Why the rush?
And why would I want to ditch Dreamweaver for Joomla?
My son changed his old Dreamweaver website to Joomla round
about three months ago, and I’d heard him describing it, otherwise I wouldn’t
have known Joomla existed. He made this change because Joomla websites are
responsive, eg they adjust to fit any size of screen, even mobile phone
screens, whereas his old Dreamweaver site was a static one which did not
adjust. I made a mental note to look into this because my site was a
Dreamweaver one as well. When I have a spare moment, I thought, I might consider
this. So, once again, why the rush into this unknown territory of Joomla?
The reason, or maybe I should say bombshell, arrived at the
beginning of April when I spotted in one of my forums that Google intended to
change their algorithms on the 21st April. The new algorithms would exclude static
websites from their search engines. Only the responsive ones would be picked
up. Now, I didn’t know if that meant my website would be excluded completely
from searches, or whether it would be so far down the list of results it would
never be found. I still don’t know, but what I do know, is that my website is
currently on page one of Google searches on my name. So, I was likely to lapse
into obscurity, and that doesn’t sell many books!
A mad scramble ensued. I bought books on how to install and
work with Joomla, and they’re not cheap. The books I bought were:
- Joomla! 3 <explained> by Stephen Burge
- Joomla 3! Beginner’s Guide by Eric Tiggeler
- Joomla! Bible by Ric Shreves
I also looked at websites, and there is an excellent set of video tutorials at Siteground. Well worth watching
Suitably armed I delved into the depths of CMS website
installation, and it’s certainly nothing like working with Dreamweaver.
Everything seemed back to front. So it was getting my head into the place where
I could understand the procedure. It’s all done online, rather than like
Dreamweaver where you add content and do changes on your computer, then upload
them to your website. With Joomla there is a backend and a frontend to the
site. The front end is what is seen on the web, and the back end is where the
content and changes are done, and the backend is online as well as the frontend.
This has the added advantage of being able to make changes to a website
anywhere there is a computer, rather than being tied to the only computer the
Dreamweaver site is on.
I found Stephen Burge’s CASh workflow system a great help
when trying to remember the order in which things had to be done. CASh stands
for:
- Categorize first – you must have a category to put your content into
- Add next – you then need to create your content, to which you subscribe a category
- Show last – after you’ve created your content and given it a category, you need to create a menu so that the content will show up on your website. If there is no menu the content will remain hidden from the public.
Taking my courage into my hands, and after consulting with
my web host, Freeola, I installed Joomla into a subfolder of my website on
Freeola. This meant I would have time to build the site before it could be
viewed on the internet. To access it myself, I only had to add the name of the
subfolder after the URL to my site. Job done, I accessed my Joomla website, and
after a bit of head scratching I started to create articles, following the CASh
procedure. There were one or two hiccups but I soon got into the swing of it,
and the textual content soon started to fill the site up. However, text alone
makes a very dull site, so images were inserted, and I set up my slideshow
heading. That was an adventure, but I got it up, then had a variety of mishaps
when I tried to insert the button links, but I eventually got there. In the
process I mucked up my horizontal menu bar. It had taken me ages to figure out
how to get it horizontal rather than vertical, and all of a sudden the menu
buttons vanished and my menu links straggled right down the page. It didn’t do
much for the appearance of my slideshow! I won’t go into details other than say
it was a painful process getting it to work again.
 |
| One of the banners from my slideshow |
Adding extensions, such as a side scroller, social media
icons for Twitter etc, a better text editor to give me more formatting options,
and a backup extension, all provided extra demands on my ability to understand
what I was doing. In the process I lost my menu bar twice, lost a complete page
on the frontend, although it was still there on the backend. And it was these
glitches that ate up the time while I tried to figure out how to sort them.
There were lots of other ups and downs, and I’m suffering
from sleep deprivation, but at the time of writing this I’m almost there. The
last thing to do is remove my old Dreamweaver website files, my website will go
down when I do that. I then have to move all my Joomla files from the subfolder
where it currently resides, into the root folder of my website. I’m already
quaking in my shoes at the prospect! And, of course, I’ll be doing that
immediately before, or during the publication of this post. So, if you click on
the URL to my website and see the old site, you’ll know I’m not quite there
yet. If you see nothing, or a page 404 error, either I’m in the process or it
hasn’t worked. And if it doesn’t work you may need to rescue me from the
nearest tall building before I jump.
Go on, click the link and see what’s at the end of it!
Chris Longmuir
Amazon
Apple iBooks
