Hello, I am in the plannig stages of building a complete website with online store for a new personal business. I've been doing alot of research on which platform to build the website, and I feel the Joomla will provide the best, most versitle backbone for my goals. The following are some of the things I would like to accomplish with the site: Professional, high-quality layout, design, and presentation of the pages, features and content. Provide an complete online store for our products. Provide a Resources Center with instructional pages, video library, image gallery, etc. Provide a forum for product and resources discussions. Provide a 3D design page for our products. (Using a commercial 3rd party software plug-in) Develop an Affiliate network. Of course there are a lot of other things, but you get the idea. Do you feel that Joomla will be a good platform for me, and will be good for the forseeable future? Also, what is the best software for the template? And what I mean by best, at least for me is... easiest to work with and quickest to customize. I'm OK with free, cheap or a few hundred dollars if it is worth it. And I guess it should be broken down into two catagories: Best software for creating and editing new templates from scratch. Best software for editing existing templates (including purchased from online sites). Please let me know your thoughts and suggestion. I appreciate it very much. Sincerely, Chris
i thinks joomla is the solution for what you need, and you can use artisteer software for create template
A good way to get to know Joomla templates, Chris, is to duplicate the ones provided with Joomla and modify them to see how they work; changing images, modifying the css etc. Personally I'm really into Fireworks (used to be Macromedia, now Adobe and part of their Creative Suite) but Photoshop is also good. Look for gimp for "free" editing software.
if you are new to joomla then its better to purchase any template with joomlart.com yootheme.com gavick.com or other sites. It will take much of your time to make a custom template by yourself. On other hand you can use freelancer.com elance.com to get someone that work done for you
So if you purchase one of these templates, but want to be able to customize some of it yourself, what is the best software to use? Thanks
yes try notepad that is best for ppls who have so much time i think that u have if not then batter to go with ready made template.
OK. I get that you can edit the code with a simple text editor. But maybe I'm missing something or maybe I wasn't clear enough. I don't really want to hand edit code. I either want to get a template and then just customize it to suit my needs using a WYSIWYG type editing program, or just create my own template. But again, I would want to use a WYSIWYG program. I have nothing against hand coding its just something I'm not going to get into. So therefore I need a good program to do the code generating for me. I understand that Artisreer is probably the program to use I'd you start from scratch, but it cannot edit existing templates that you can purchase. So if I do want to buy a nice template and then do some minor WYSIWYG editing, what is the best program to go with. Thank you.
Yes, Joomla will work well. Use the following componets, in order of your requirements. Virtuemart Joomdoc - not the old docman Kunena forum Globacide, VM affiliate I am using all of them on my site.
Probably best that you use http://www.artisteer.com/ then; I have no idea how to use it as I prefer to use Fireworks & Photoshop. As a pro I couldn't imagine using a WYSIWYG editor of any kind as I find they throw up extraneous code, remove complete control and impose restrictions upon my creativity plus they remove all the fun of knowing the mechanics of how the underlying system works (and all the major advantages of that). If you do intend to try and modify any existing templates then be aware that you will need to abide by the licensing provided with that template - meaning that you may not have permission to redesign and reuse that template or that if you do then you must do so under certain conditions; that may entail that you rewrite and modify the provided licensing to reflect any changes made. Good luck