As most of the graphic tool user, I find that GIMP is simply a good image editing software. Certain advanced graphic designer may prefer Adobe Photoshop, but it’s kind of expensive. If you are running a small business or building a website for fun, then you definitely want a free software, hence I suggest using GIMP, which can be downloaded from here:

http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

Besides that GIMP software itself, I also recommend that you download the optional help files and animation packages. If you try to search for GIMP tutorial on Google, you’ll be able to find plenty of tutorials on how to use the program. If you are need to save your time in learning this new software, I would suggest that you try to learn the GIMP video tutorials. This is the GIMP introduction video.

After you’ve got image editing software, eg GIMP, you need to find a good background for your image/graphic. I find that the best backgrounds are scenic landscapes: mountain views, beaches, parks, cityscapes, urban vistas, forests, lakes, etc. To avoid copyright issues, you should grab a digital camera, go out and take a picture yourself from someplace near your house. Or try to search for public domain graphics. Sometimes a simple color with tone may serve as a great background. Most of the time, it depends on your preference on how to design the graphic.

Once you’ve got your background image, then you can make the graphic look nicer by adding some pictures of people, animals, vehicles, or other objects in the right or left side of the image (obviously you should use something that is related to the topic of your web site). You can get people pictures by surfing the Internet for clip-art collections, or by taking photos of your friends and family. So let’s say you want create a header for your website, and hence you can place your lovable pet dog to appear on the right side of your “Dog’s Website” header. For example, you can try to follow these steps:

1. Take a picture of your dog and open it with GIMP.

2. Resize the picture so it’s small enough to fit into your website header.

3. Use GIMP’s tool to outline the dog and copy & paste it on top of your background as a new layer.

4. Use the move tool to position the dog where you want it.

5. Zoom in and use the eraser tool to get rid of any messy edges around the dog. You want the dog to blend into the background so it’s not obvious that you copied; pasted from another image.

The last step is to add your title and sub-heading text. Obviously the title should be larger than the sub-heading. You might also want to use different colors to differentiate the sub-heading from the title. Pick an empty area in the middle of your header for the title text. The sub-heading usually goes at the bottom below the title. I like to use Arial or Impact for the font. Impact makes a good impression for the title and Arial is good for the sub-heading.

Try to use the font tool to add some effect on the text. Try to tweak the setting so that it looks outstanding and enhanced on the website header.

And that’s it! You’re done! Don’t forget to save the final image in jpg, png or gif file. So that you can use it for your website.

It sounds complicated but it’s really not that hard. Once you are familiar with the process, it should only take you 30 minutes to 1 hour to make something from scratch that looks really nice!

Wow, this is Great! Now What?

You should start to put a header graphic on every major page of your site, especially your website’s homepage. If you’ve learnt how to download thousands of websites from Joomla Template Secrets, then you should be able to find that there are many images from the template itself that you can reuse to do some little changes to enhance it for your website theme.

With GIMP, you can have really nice professional header graphics for your web site with very little time and effort. They will make your site look more attractive and will entice more people to read your content. And that’s never a bad thing!

To learn more about GIMP, you can check the GIMP video tutorials – Lesson 1.

So, How Do We Create Great Web Graphics for Joomla Websites (or any website): There are 3 main ways to get header graphics, depending on how much time and money that you have. 1. The expensive way – hire a professional graphic designer to make them for you 2. The cheap way – buy a customizable set of pre-made graphics from the Internet 3. The free way – make them yourself!

Option #1: Hire a Professional Graphic Designer
It may be great for big corporations that have a lot of money, but it’s not so practical for small businesses or individuals who make web pages as a hobby. Sure, you might be able to hire a freelance graphic designer who will charge $50 per image or something like that, but even that’s a lot of money for most people. When I design web sites, I prefer option #2.

Option #2: Buy a Customizable Set of Pre-Made Graphics from Internet
This is a great balance between time and money. It’s easy to find good image packages that cost a lot less than hiring a professional. Such packages typically provide a number of different generic backgrounds and styles so you can pick one that fits the topic of your site. Files are given to you in a format that makes it easy to edit the individual elements of the image, such as the popular Adobe Photoshop .psd format or extensions that GIMP supported. For example in the image editable file, image elements are organized in layers that can be turned on and off, or changed as you see fit. So you could pick something that you like, change the title and sub-heading to be whatever you want, and then save the new image as a .jpg file for your web page and you’re done! It’s that easy! You can have a nice, professional looking header for your web site in as little as 2 or 3 minutes! All you have to do is spend a little bit of time and money finding a good graphics package to use. If you have a little more time and want to make something truly original, then you can go with option #3.

Option #3: Do It Yourself
However, it doesn’t mean that you have to do it from ground up. There are many ways to find available graphics from internet and use the freely available software to modify it yourself. Making your own website is not as difficult as you thing and it rewards as well. If you are good at it, you could even go into business for yourself as a freelance graphic designer or make your own graphics package to sell! Tools that you can use are Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. Adobe Photoshop is a commercial too but it is far more advanced. As a beginner for graphic design, I would suggest that you use GIMP, as it is a free tool yet with lots of great functions.

Here is a GIMP video tutorial lesson 1 that is available for you to learn how create a Web 2.0 Graphics. Check it out the complete tutorials: Complete GIMP Video tutorials.

In 2000, Joomla was developed as another similar system called Mambo. The next time you download a Joomla template, you might enjoy knowing how it is one of those success stories of this decade as well. Because Joomla took the pain out of content management, and because it could easily work with modular extensions like plugins. It became even more popular. The template for Mambo might be able to work for Joomla too. As Joomla templates can be easily found on the internet, yet the commonly asked question is “where can I find best Joomla template to download?”

Various add-ons work in the backend of the system extend Joomla functionality to a new level. It was able to meet the needs different type of community based internet with even more comprehensive extensions that allow webmasters to build niches, back up websites, payment system, translate content and create URLs that are friendlier to the search engines.

When Joomla start to become more popular, it was only a matter of time professional Joomla templates to explode into businesses. And explode it did. You can find free Joomla templates in so many different places from the commercial as long as you know how to find it. You can download Joomla templates and customize that will do pretty much whatever you need. It is interesting to note that the official Joomla community (where you can download Joomla templates of terrific capability, by the way) is listed has having a forum of more than 200,000 registered users, and over 300,000 Joomla threads, with more than 1.3 million posts – and that is in 40 different languages.

That is one good sized official Joomla community! There are however, unofficial Joomla communities too. You can see lots of different free Joomla templates and download them as well. There are even bi-directional text for Hebrew and Arabic. From just the usership and community strength alone it becomes quite easy to see why free Joomla templates are such a great resource for web developers and companies, as well as for individuals or family type websites. There is no shortage of support when you download Joomla templates. There is no concerns about getting yourself into something that you won’t be able to have on your site as mainstream. Then when you take a look at the fact that there are users for Joomla templates in 40 different languages, you begin to see that Joomla has truly gone international.

That means no matter what country you are in, no matter what language you are using, more than likely you will be able to download Joomla templates and also access free Joomla templates for your website. There is so much good news when you start looking into Joomla that it is quite refreshing. And another nice thing about Joomla templates is that they are constantly being added to the Joomla communities main sites. As you grow, and need more things for your content management systems, you will find and be able to download Joomla templates to help you achieve that goal. And as the communities keep putting up the Joomla templates you will find more and more free Joomla templates to choose from as well. The questions is how much templates that you can actually find; how many templates that are really quality that qualified to suit your website themes? How to get it?

An efficient and great way to create a professional looking website is using Joomla and its pre-designed website Joomla Templates. And you may easily get many free or commercial templates on many web sites on the internet.

Free Joomla Templates
If you have limited budget on getting your Joomla website done, a better approach is to use the templates that are for available for download for free. These templates are very clean and yet attractive. But you do, though, you must understand even free templates are available everywhere but great Joomla templates are not easy to find.

Cheap Joomla Templates
Once you have little budget for commecial or paid templates, this are thing better for investigation for slightly better templates. The idea behind those websites that sell cheap templates are they pay the designers small amount of fees per template sold, and resell it as many times as they wish for a quite relatively low price. This option allows joomla template designers to be paid for the amount of templates sold, without ever dealing with customers. On the other side, it allows customers to buy and use the templates for a price substantially below hiring any professional web designer to design for them

Exclusive Joomla Templates
Certain Joomla webmasters may feel dislike if the other sites are using the same design as theirs, they starts to purchasing exclusive Joomla templates from websites that sell professional designed Joomla templates only once, to a site, then removed. This is the unique Joomla template that the webmaster can get, but at a relatively high price, which can range up to few hundreds dollar per template depending on the design.

With different types of Joomla template, designers are free to create great templates, and Joomla webmasters can consider whether they like it for free or getting it for amount amount of fees or unique design with premium price. Sometimes, it needs to take all the uncertainty and negotiation at both sides, and both the template designer and the webmaster leaves much happier than they would have been. Of course, if there is something that you want changed little on its design, most of the template designer are happy to do it a small amount fee.

Joomla is a great CMS that has been around for few years, evolved from Mambo, and now version 1.5. It is a feature packed CMS software free for download that is part of the explosive realm of content management systems. You can easily build a webpage and do it fast, no doubt staying is Joomla is unquestionable.

Also known as CMSs, content management systems are big with both consumers and businesses, especially businesses that want to be successful. From basic processes like updating website content to more sophisticated features like enhancing your ability to work with RSS feeds, archival of high speed data, etc, Joomla is in the lead in all areas….and very high demand. Other CMS developers are already clamoring to make their products Joomla friendly.

Take a look at what makes content management systems so popular. The short list of features:

• Articles
• Blogs
• Calendars
• Forums
• FAQs
• Image Library
• Language Internationalization
• Links
• Newsflashes/News
• Page Caching
• Polls and Surveys
• Printable page versions
• Web Indexing
• Site Search and more…

If you, like me, need all the help you can get to make a webpage readable, Joomla insiders are promising anyone can be a whiz at fabricating webpages with their easy to use templates. Their software promises…and delivers the ability to design or alter your website at warp speed. You can preview your layouts in a number of ways and duplicate the geekiest applications without breaking a sweat. You’ll know how the finished product looks within 97% accuracy.

Banners, sales page mockups, and any of a hundred marketing related function become an in-house operation. The small business sector is raving about Joomla and we’ve not seen its best work yet.

Accessories & Templates

Joomla Inc. does not work like other software powerhouses. Their brain trust is actually what the name implies. No less than a thousand or so developers drive the development of this scalable and adaptable tool. Their ability to create and deliver add-on and accessories is only matched by the growing levels of consumer demand.

This CMS is necessarily developing its commercial product line while it expands its open source software that merges smoothly with webpage functions. After all, this was the foundation from which the phenomena has grown.

Joomla is moving steadily into more and more areas of commerce like:

• Specialized products for the real estate industry
• Agriculture
• Animal related businesses
• Business Management products
• Fashion
• Medicine
• Hotels

The company intends to extend its reach and its impact across the world in progressive ways, many of which have not even hit the drawing board.

“It’s all about value and application,” wrote one reviewer. The message is clear….. Joomla isn’t a real comer anymore, many have been using this and have great success, it doesn’t matter if you would like to build a website for your business, personal hobby that have lots of functions. It definitely a good choice.

About The Author

For more information about Joomla go to my blog: http://joomlasourcebook.blogspot.com

Alex Rich PhD, has been a business coach for 15 years. A recent client grew his revenue from scratch to $7 million monthly in less than 9 months. Dr. Rich also writes business articles but quickly admits his true passion is coaching Internet start-ups.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alex_Rich

One of the biggest challenges with a CMS is getting a nice looking template that differentiates your website from the competition. A major challenge with any CMS driven site for someone who is not a skilled web designer is achieving a look and feel that avoids the “sameness” of a lot of CMS driven websites. Luckily Joomla templates are quite easy to build if you’re already a skilled designer. If you’re not then you are still in luck as there are literally hundreds of Joomla templates out there that will get you up and running in no time. Joomla templates can be grouped into roughly 3 categories:

• free joomla templates
• joomla template clubs
• commercial joomla templates

There are advantages to each group. Free templates are obviously free! Having said that you’ll most likely easily find another website using the same template as you pretty easily. If that’s not a problem for you then great – off you go! If this is an issue then commercial Joomla templates could be the way to go.Why commercial joomla templates?

Commercial joomla templates can be of significant value to you as a Joomla website administrator. Key advantages include:

• can be of exceptionally high quality – you’ll generally find joomla template designers churn out some of the best looking templates for any CMS on the market. But do be careful to ensure the build quality (including HTML/CSS, javacript) is up to scratch. Buyer beware, there are also commercial joomla templates out there who sacrifice quality for quantity! Bestofjoomla.com is a great site for getting great feedback on joomla template designers.
• support, support, support – let’s face it, your going to want to tweak a logo here, a few colours there and maybe even make some layout changes. That’s where a good support network comes into play. Check out the joomla template creators website and make sure you can get support online.
• Price – don’t get ripped off! You’ll find most commercial joomla templates range in price from as low as $10 up to $100 – don’t pay any more than that unless you want an exclusive license for the template just for your site – unless you’re happy to be potentially ripped off!

Anyways, that raps us up for the moment. If you’ve not yet had a chance to play would Joomla! I would encourage to check it out – it’s a fantastic open source CMS that will run just about any site with ease.

Ed Bloom is nuts about Joomla and has been building Joomla templates since the project was born. Ed is the CEO of the highly successful joomla design agency Joomlacreative.com, which specialises in creating beautiful commercial joomla templates.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ed_Bloom