So you’ve installed Joomla and you’re looking at a shiny, fresh, but, most of all, empty backend. Now what? This article explains how to set up a super basic website for a small business.

Disclaimer: this article is mainly about structure. So no fancy stuff, no layouts, no colours, just the backbone of your website.

In Joomla, you can install sample data for your website. That’s an easy and fast way to create everything we describe below. The downside of this is that you don’t actually know how your website is structured. Doing it yourself takes more time, but you’ll have a better understanding of what you’re doing. 

Step 1 - Define your pages

What do you want to show to your visitor? Make a list of the pages you’d like to have on your website. In this example we will create these pages:

• Home: page with one text
• About us: page with one text on top and three small blocks below with readmore
• What we do: page with one text
• Portfolio: page with 12 small blocks with readmore
• News: page with one text on top and 12 small blocks below with readmore
• Contact: contact form for the business owner 

If you're the visual type, like me, you can take a piece of paper and draw an outline of what you’d like to see on each page.

Step 2 - Content preparation: create categories

Now we'll create a category for each of those items, except for Contact (we’ll come to that later). Let's start with About us.

Head over to your admin panel and click the little plus icon next to Categories. Type About us in the title field and click Save & new.

Repeat this for Home, What we do, Portfolio and News.

Step 3 - Content preparation: create articles

For each category, create one or more articles. In this case, we want About us to have an article about our history, an article about our vision, another one about our people and the last one will be about the office dog.

We go back to the admin panel and click the plus icon next to Articles. Type in the title and some text (can be dummy text at this stage). 

On our About us page, we want just the introtext to show for each article (except the one we want to show on top). For this we can add a readmore link.

Put your cursor where you want the readmore link to be shown (usually after the first few lines). Click in the editor on CMS Content and choose readmore.

A horizontal line now shows, indicating the spot where the introtext gets separated from the rest of the text.

The last step is choosing the right category for our article to appear in. From the category dropdown in the right sidebar, choose About us. 

Click Save & new and create articles for the other three articles in the category.

Next on the list is What we do. In our case, we need just one article for that. We add it, type a title and some text, choose the right category and click Save & new. The same goes for Home, we want just one article there. Remember to pick the right category 🙃

Repeat this for the other two categories, Portfolio and News. Create all articles you need, or just a few to start with.

For more information about articles and categories, check the Joomla User Guide: https://guide.joomla.org/user-manual/getting-started/getting-started-articles-and-categories  

You may want to use images in your articles. Joomla has options for an intro image and a full text image. The intro image will appear on pages with multiple articles (see below), the full text image will appear when just one article is shown. This article in the Joomla User Guide tells you more about this: https://guide.joomla.org/user-manual/articles/articles-article-images-and-links  

Step 4 - Make your pages visible: the menu

Sometimes, you will want to show multiple articles on a page. For example: About us needs to show four articles. Other pages should show just one article, like in our case What we do and Home. 

Page with one article: What we do

In the left sidebar, click on Menus and then click the plus icon next to Main Menu. 

Type What we do in the title field. 

For the menu item type, click the Select button. 

First on the list is Articles. Click on this and choose Single article.

Now you can select the article you want to show (note: you could also create a new article here; this is a great approach if you have a super simple site with just articles and no categories - you could start with the menu-items (pages) and create articles as you go). 

We want to show the article called What we do, so we select that. Click Save & close and you're done. 

If you now check the frontend of your website, you’ll see the menu item is added to the menu and the page is there. 

Multiple articles: the other pages

Our About us page should show one large article and three intros below it. 

This menu item starts the same way, by creating a new menu item. Instead of Single article, choose Category blog. 

Select the category About us and click on the Blog Layout tab. You can now choose how many leading articles you want to display (one) and how many intro articles (three). Save & close and you're done.

If you check the frontend of your website now, you’ll see About us is added in the menu. Click on it to see what your About us page looks like. Check what happens if you change anything in the Blog Layout, for example the ordering.

Repeat these steps for the categories Portfolio and News.

You may want to change the Blog Layout settings here. Take Portfolio for example: I can imagine you want to show no full articles and, say, 12 intro articles. You can change that in the Blog Options. Or you could show one full article and 12 intro articles below that, and change the ordering to Random so it shows a different portfolio item on top every time the page changes.

For more information about menus and menu items, see the Joomla User Guide: https://guide.joomla.org/user-manual/menus  

Pro tip: when you created the categories, you may have seen the options Save to Menu as List and Save to Menu as Blog. If you click those, a menu-item is created for you.  

And another pro tip: the same goes for articles, you can save them as a menu item as well. 

And yet another pro tip: if you want full control over the ordering of this page, set the ordering in the Blog Layout to Article ordering. Head over to your articles, filter them by category and then drag and drop them in the right order.

Step 5: The contact page

For the contact page, we can use the built-in contact options. First, we need to create a contact, and after that, we will create a menu item.

To create a contact, we click Components -> Contacts in the left sidebar, and then the first option, Contacts. You’ll then see this:

Click Add your first contact.

Fill in the name for the contact. If you link it to an existing user - which I did here - you don’t have to add the email address.

Now, create a new menu item. Type Contact us in the title field. For the menu item type, click the Select button. Choose Contacts, and then Single Contact.

Select the contact you just created, then click Save & close. 

Our website now has a fully functioning contact option.

If you want to know more, for example about how to list multiple contacts, find the Joomla User Guide here: https://guide.joomla.org/user-manual/contacts/contacts-contacts  

Step 6: The Home page

Our Home page should contain just one article, the one we created earlier. We just need to make sure that article is shown on this page. 

Joomla has a built-in menu item for your Home page. By default it’s set to “Featured articles”, but we can change that so it shows the article meant for Home.

For that, head over to your Main Menu in the left sidebar. Click it. You’ll see a list of all your menu-items. Below Home, you’ll see it’s set to Featured Articles. 

Click the menu-item. Click the Select button to choose another menu-item type.

Choose Single Article (just like you did earlier) and pick the right article.

Save & close the menu-item. Your new homepage should show right away!

Portfolio and News

The pages for Portfolio and News are both set up as a category blog and look like this:

These are just the basics

There’s a lot more to discover for you, but these are the basics of setting up your small business website. You’ll find lots of documentation and user guides here: https://guide.joomla.org.