Thursday 28 March 2024

8 Things to Do Before Building a Joomla Website

There are many methods we can choose when we want to build a Joomla-based website. Joomla is an open source and versatile platform, allowing us to gain many things. However, we need to do the following things to ensure success with Joomla:

  1. Create spare domain: We may need to create a couple of domains on our host and host Joomla websites on both of them. One can be named ourdomainname.com and another ourdomainname.net. Beginners often make mistake with Joomla and if we do something catastrophic, we still have a spare website.
  2. Learn more about FTP: Before we can use Joomla, it is important to understand file transfer protocol or FTP. The most common software for managing FTP account is FileZilla. It allows us to move, copy and delete files between FTP accounts. We can also change file names with FTP software. With FileZilla, we will also need to rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess to make sure that SEO will work.
  3. Change URL to SEO-friendly format: Without this method, we will get impossibly long URLs that don’t seem to be related with the content of the page. For this purpose, we will need to install a plugin that convert standard Joomla URLs into a format that’s recognized by Google’s bots. This is something that we need to do early in the development phase, because changing our URL later could cause us serious headaches. Our websites will be riddled with many 404 not found errors due to changes in URL.
  4. Use third-party control panel: Joomla is equipped with its own basic control panel, which is suitable for most purposes. However, there are multiple free control panels that provide additional functionality. K2 is a good example of enhanced control panel and it is compatible with many software.
  5. Install directory component: It is essential if our website will serve many people. It will be a directory of our participants and in this case, we should install it soon.
  6. Choose a good template: We should do this very early and before adding content, we will need a template that matches with the overall feel and look of our website. However, we will need to be careful and the template should be compatible with our control panel component. There are thousands of templates available and choosing one of them can feel like shopping. We shouldn’t choose a template that appeals to us, instead it should be appealing for our audience.
  7. Use password control: If we want to successfully build a Joomla website, we may need to create multiple accounts. These accounts may include email, online forums and others. It means we need to deal with many username and passwords. In this case, it should be wise to keep a list of our passwords and username handy and we shouldn’t allow them strewn all over our desk.
  8. Use security mechanism: Users may hate using Captcha in our website, but they will appreciate our concerns for ensuring safety.

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