WHAT IS A WEBSITE ? A website is an address (location/server) on the World Wide Web that contains your web pages. A website is your personal online communications connection to the rest of the world

MEDIA TYPES A website is totally different from any other type of publishing, advertising or communications media. When you create a brochure, magazine or book for publication, you determine content, print it and it is finished.

FUNDAMENTALS OF AN OUTSTANDING WEBSITE Information Relevance Design ….read more about web standard checklist

Making a website is easy. Making a good website is not so easy. There are many elements that you have to consider if you want to make a good and successful website. What are these elements ?

SELECT A COLOUR SCHEME AND STICK TO IT. The most common colour schemes include: - Red, yellow and white - Blue and white - Red, grey and white - Blue, orange and white - Yellow, grey and white. 1

2 CHOOSE YOUR SUBJECT The most important part of any site is the subject, so choose wisely. It should be a topic that you're interested in, enjoy reading about and would like to write about too. Take your time with this decision. Get it right and the next steps will be easier.

3 PROVIDE AN EASY TO USE NAVIGATION SYSTEM Visitors can find what they are looking easily. Include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.

4 DON’T GO OVERBOARD ON SPECIAL EFFECTS It is ok to have one or two special effects to jazz up your website, spinning graphics and logos often distract your visitor from the content.

5 BACKGROUNDS Ensure your visitors can read the text on the background, Links are visible before and after being visited

EXTERNAL LINKS It is a good idea to open links to other websites in a new window 6

SITE MAP & SEARCH FEATURE If you website is more than 15 pages, it is useful to have a site map or a “Search” feature to ensure your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for. 7

8 CONTENT IS KING While it is important that your website looks clean and professional, it is far more important that you concentrate your efforts on the content and promotion.

THINGS TO STAY AWAY Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes Loads of pop up or pop under boxes Auto play music. Allow your customer to play music only if they choose Hit counters of the free variety, which say “you are 27th visitor” Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly Busy backgrounds.

WHAT IS CONTENT? Content is the material that appears on your site and which you hope your visitors will enjoy reading or seeing

WEB DESIGN TOOLS HTML SOFTWARE Content Management System (CMS) PHP

Content Management System (CMS) A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage.

CMS WEB TOOLS Joomla PHP Nuke Drupal Mambo EZ Publish Plone

WHAT IS JOOMLA? Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS). Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.award-winning

WHY JOOMLA? Fresh content Dynamic Menu Items Making site-wide changes Consistent look and feel CMS Components

WANT TO TRY JOOMLA? BASIC TEMPLATE ADMIN TEMPLATE BACKEND FRONTEND DEMO SITE FREE TUTORIAL Watch Joomla in Youtube? Click hereClick here

SAMPLE

WEBSITE SAMPLE USING JOOMLA

REFERENCES Clare Rogers & John Kirriemuir (2003). Developing a content management system website. Retrieved September 15 th, 2008 from Jacob Nielsen (2005). Ten Usability Heuristics. Retrieved September 15 th, 2008 from Jennifer Kyrnin (2008). Why you need content management. Retrieved September 14 th, 2008 from Russ Weakley (2004). Web standards checklist. Retrieved September 16 th, 2008 from Usability first: Web design (2008). Website design: your online guide to usability resources. Retrieved September 14 th, 2008 from Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia (2008). Web content management system. Retrieved September 15 th, 2008 from