I created a website about scrapbooking. It is intended to help those do-it-yourself craft people get started in creating scrapbooks. I have articles on starting a project, tools, albums, embellishments, paper, and wrapping up the project. I edited each page to have correct spacing so it flows well, added tags, limited the details to publish date and views, and added a photo.
For navigation, there is a main menu at the top and breadcrumb menu at the bottom. Also, the homepage has links embedded in text so that as a viewer reads they can go to any page. There are links to the right that display tags and recent articles. I chose to keep those because I thought they would be useful as the website was built out. There is also a logo at the top of the pages.
Joomla is cumbersome and not intuitive. I do think my training in other CMS platforms assisted in navigating the control panel. The items that frustrated me the most were the templates and positioning the menus.
Joomla comes standard with two site templates: Protostar and Beez3. Protostar seemed a bit simple so I went with Beez3 for a bold page look. The template had five different color schemes but I chose Red to match my logo. However, that was the only thing you could really change. I wanted to change the position of the logo in the red header and add blue elements but it was difficult. I also had trouble re-positioning the main menu to be in a location of my choosing.
I decided to go to the Cloud Access website to see about different templates. There were a few free templates. However, the staff at Cloud Access have to upload it for you. So though I downloaded a new template, I couldn't use it properly.
After the continued problems tailoring Beez3 to my needs, I switched back to Protostar. I figured in this case, simple was better. I was able to change the coloring of some things to red, allowing for a more consistent look. It looks like all the elements were meant to go together.
At the end of the day, I am happy with the Cascade CMS used at my university. It is much more intuitive and easier to change features.
Here is my website.
Update:
I just realized that some people were successful in uploading third party templates. That was a great to know. I am now going to have to figure it out myself. :)
Hi, Shannan! I really like the look of your Joomla site--it's so bright and cheery, but still streamlined and professional. I can tell you've had experience using a CMS!
ReplyDeleteI've never used Cascade before--I'm a die-hard WordPress fan--but I figure that most CMSs have got to be more intuitive than Joomla. From a user standpoint, one would think that changing a template would be relatively easy, but not so in Joomla. I would think that the template designers would acknowledge that people are going to want to change it, and therefore make it easy to change...but I guess we both figured out that wasn't true. :)
Still, you managed to make your site look really nice, so kudos!
Thank you! I definitely don't think it would be my first choice but I am happy for the experience. I read your blog as well. I think we had a lot of the same experiences. The tutorials on Google were a big help. I think the official tutorials were a little long and sometimes took awhile to get to the instructions.
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