For my consulting business I wanted to build a nice website that was very functional and had a modern look. I've never been very artistic so most of my options are Content Management Systems that are popular so creative people have made so many templates that I could make my site look unique without very much effort. Another issue I have had in the past is that I would build a site using various open source products, but none of them would talk to one another. So I might have a calendar on a site that has one set of usernames and then a forum that has another set. It can be pretty frustrating to integrate sometimes.

My web hosting company actually has a bunch of CMS systems that can install with a few clicks. I picked Joomla because it is insanely popular, has many modules that integrate seamlessly with it, and the learning curve was not very high to get started with it. I would recommend folks install it and pick to install the demo content, and then mess around and uninstall it. Then re-install it without the demo content and go through the Quick Start Guide. I was able to basically understand things in about two hours, and then in the third hour I was up and running. That might sound like a lot, but honestly three hours to learn a CMS system is pretty good. If you start playing with

Once I understood how Joomla works I moved on to Extensions to add a forum to my website. I chose Kunena which I had never heard of before, but it looked very nice. You can see my forum here. It took about 2 minutes total to setup the forum, and integrating it in the website was simply a matter of editing the top menu to add an entry that was a link to the Kunena module.

Lastly I still have to pick a theme. Right now I'm just using the default theme, but I edited the template.css inside the theme to point to my logo instead of the default, and I changed the hight and width to match my logo. First go to Extensions -> Template Manager and pick to edit the rhuk_milkyway theme. Next click to Edit CSS, and then pick to edit the template.css file. Note that the images folder referenced in template.css is not your /joomla/images/ folder but rather a folder in the theme. I changed the below to ../../../images/jnux_logo.png because my image is inside /joomla/images/ and changed the height and width to match my logo.

I hope this information is helpful to anyone setting out to run a website for work or for recreation. I think Joomla can fit both types of needs. If you need someone to host your Joomla site please consider my web hosting company http://www.jnuxhosting.net for your needs.