How to Build a Website with Joomla 3?

Joomla is one of the longest and most famous FREE open source projects next to WordPress. As it continues to thrive in 2015, Joomla remains the second most popular content management system (CMS), behind only WordPress.
You have almost certainly used or heard of Joomla at some point, but if you haven’t used it in a while, the latest release (Joomla 3) provides plenty of reasons to give it a fresh look.
Joomla 3 is a fascinating product and was the first CMS to be completely responsive for both visitors and administrators. Joomla 3 is responsive because the Joomla team decided to adopt the Bootstrap framework. The use of Bootstrap makes Joomla 3 attractive for front-end designers, but it also makes it easy for developers to create interfaces for their code. You really can get a Joomla 3 website up and running in just a few minutes.

What makes Joomla so popular?

The list is rather long, and we won’t enumerate all Joomla advantages, but some of them are simply impossible not to mention. They are:
•    Simplicity of use.
•    Extensibility.
•    The CMS keeps track of every piece of content on your web site.
•    Requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage.
•    Web developers can quickly build sites for their clients.
•    Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you’re not an advanced user.
•    Joomla community of friendly users and talented developers still continues to grow.
•    Joomla’s powerful application framework makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated, advanced add-ons that limitlessly extend the power of Joomla.

What Kind of Websites are Joomla Suitable for?

•    Corporate web sites or portals.
•    Corporate intranets and extranets.
•    Online magazines, newspapers, and publications.
•    E-commerce and online reservations.
•    Government applications.
•    Small business Web sites.
•    Non-profit and organizational Web sites.
•    Community-based portals.
•    School and church web sites.
•    Personal or family homepages.

Downloading Joomla

http://joomla.org is the place to start researching Joomla.
This site has an introductory video and plenty of information about Joomla’s features. You’ll see that Joomla 3 features Bootstrap, LESS, jQuery and support for other databases such as PostgreSQL.
If you want to take Joomla for a test drive you can click the orange “Live Demo” button.
But to build our website in this tutorial we’ll click the green “Download” button.

http://www.joomla.org/download.html is the place to download the latest release of Joomla 3.
Joomla 3 is the recommended version for new sites, although also available on this page is Joomla 2.5, the older, but still supported, version.

Click the blue “Download Joomla 3” button.

Installing Joomla

To install Joomla – you have two options. For both ways, you’ll need a hosting and domain name. I’m recommending www.bluehost.com web hosting for Joomla as it’s probably the cheapest and most convenient hosting plan for a beginner.
1) With one click installation – shouldn’t take more thasuchn 3 minutes for a beginner.
2) Manually – this could take approximately 20-30 minutes. (Click to expand the tutorial)
 

Installing Themes/Extensions

Once your website is installed, you can add Joomla templates and extensions from a dozen of websites ranging from SiteGround, TemplateMonster, ThemeForest and more.
Although Joomla comes with a lot of built-in functions by default, with extensions you can add a whole new functionality to your site with just a few clicks. For example, if you want to build an Online Holiday and Property Rental website, themes and extensions such as COMDEV’s JomHoliday’s extension, with advanced features including: map search, custom fields based on categories, online booking and payment, availability that can save many hours of development time.

1. Once you have your Joomla template downloaded on your computer, login to the administrative area of your Joomla website and upload the template through the Extension Manager (Extensions -> Extension Manager). The process is the same for templates, modules, plugins and components.
2. Change your default Joomla template/extension to the new one - Once the template is installed in your Joomla 3 application, you need to make it default for your website so your pages get the new design. First, you need to go to Extensions -> Template Manager.
3. Once in the Template Manager page, you will see a list of the installed templates available for your site and the administrative area. Locate the one you want to use on your site and click on the star icon next to it.

After that, all you need to do is edit your content, add images and modify any designs to the website, and it is good to go!