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q.D.paToOtieSBye bye Frontpage (muhaha!!! very wicked gleeful laugh), I'm a Joomla girl now! Thank goodness for computer gurus who provide us with a workable Open Source solution to building a decent looking website. WOOHOO! I think I may have told you that I was dabbling in Joomla the other day. Well, I really put my mind to it and re-vamped my whole website. If you can Blog and add Widgets, then you can Joomla. And there are so many free, pretty templates out there that you can modify and make your own. I like to be coordinated so I carried mine across to my Blog and my Etsy shop while I was in the re-vamp mood.
Anyway, I'm pretty proud of myself so I'd like you to take a look if you get a chance. I've also really pared things down and there's not as much "stuff" on there. I've also been trying to go for the "KISS" (keep it simple stupid) approach.
Back to doing my happy dance...
Back Road BearsWow!!! I'm impressed too!!! :clap: :clap: :clap:
The Available & Adopted tab links in the menu across the top don't link to the proper Flicker page and the Blog tab link doesn't work.
In the verticle menu on the left the Blog link doesn't work again but the rest are perfect!
I love the look! Fanastic job!!! I truly am incredibly impressed! Looks like a very professionally designed site! Are you for hire??? 
q.D.paToOtieSThanks Daphne. Actually, I think the Blog thing is just something with Blogger. The last two days it's been acting totally wacky! I'm beginning to wonder if it has anything to do with the "leap day" (because the "weirdness" started yesterday) but I'm sure they considered that when writing Blogger software. I only suspected a whole Blogger issue as I couldn't read Aleta's Blog yesterday for the same error or anyone else who I know is on Blogger. So those two buttons do work.
Yep, I'm going to have to figure out those buttons at the top (actually I'd just like to get rid of them). I don't know why, for instance, their isn't one for every item (like Press). Really weird.
But there's a learning curve to every new adventure! LOL!
q.D.paToOtieSThe Available & Adopted tab links in the menu across the top don't link to the proper Flicker page and the Blog tab link doesn't work.
In the verticle menu on the left the Blog link doesn't work again but the rest are perfect!I love the look! Fanastic job!!! I truly am incredibly impressed! Looks like a very professionally designed site! Are you for hire??? :D
Hey Daphne, I fixed it. I figured out that those tabs at the top are called a "pill_menu." Since I didn't really like them, they didn't match the links even with the corresponding menu on the side, I just went into the html code and deleted them! HA! Guess I showed them!
P.S. No one would hire me to do their website because really I am like a madwoman. I screw up all the time for the love of the "learning process" and have to go back and apply all sorts of "band-aids" to hide my boo-boos!
Lisa I LOVE your new site!!!! 
Lisa what a great job you made of your new site - I love it
Hugs
Carolyn
q.D.paToOtieSThanks Laura Lynn and Carolyn! I always get tickled when I can do something myself. I have relied on Frontpage so long that I think initially it was really scary to break away from it. We'll see how this works for a while. There are a couple other freebies out there too but this one just seemed so much like my Blog that I felt comfortable with it.
Swan Valley BearsLooks great, Lisa ! ! ! I love the little striped elephant dancing in the flowers at the top of the page.
Teddy-Folk:clap: Most excellent Lisa! I want to play with it too, I'm off to find out more 
Dorothy
Lisa,
I love the new look. Very easy to navigate and the colors suit your style perfectly. I also love the little elephant dancing across the top of the page.
I was looking at Joomla myself but didn't find any templates I liked. If you don't mind me asking, can you provide a link for the wonderful one you used? No, I don't want to use the same one...LOL!!! I just thought they must have something else that would be good and I definitely hadn't seen the one you used before.
Hugs,
Posts: 3,540:clap: It looks really nice Lisa!! :clap: I'm another who loves to make her own when it comes to websites, but I wouldn't know the first thing about HTML code. The WYSIWYG system works best for me
I like the soothing colors to your pages though.
q.D.paToOtieSLisa,
I love the new look. Very easy to navigate and the colors suit your style perfectly. I also love the little elephant dancing across the top of the page.
I was looking at Joomla myself but didn't find any templates I liked. If you don't mind me asking, can you provide a link for the wonderful one you used? No, I don't want to use the same one...LOL!!! I just thought they must have something else that would be good and I definitely hadn't seen the one you used before.
Hugs,
Hi Gijzette and all,
My Joomla template came from Siteground (they will also host your Joomla website for a very small fee - $5.95 a month!) You probably wouldn't have seen the one that I used because it really looks insignificant when it's a little thumbnail. I think I passed it by three times before I decided to use it. Anyway, these sites should keep you pretty occupied when looking for templates.
The first is called "Best of Joomla." If the link below doesn't work, go to http://www.bestofjoomla.com then hit the "Templates" tab and then on the menu on the far right hand side called "Templates Menu" hit "Free Templates." Yes, even though this is Open Source Software, some people charge for their templates so free is the way to go. This is like the mega-site for templates. Mine came from there and if you look under "Template Providers" I think Siteground is the first one. You can also explore them by color. When you open a template that you like, it will have a color chart at the bottom. Just hit the color that you like and it will bring up all the templates that fit that color scheme. The "little dancing elephant" was my first real q.D.paToOtieS creation (I think anyway) and so he deserved to dance at the top of my template. My customization involved just a lot of layering. But there are templates that are even easier to customize. You can just replace the banner that they have with your own.
http://www.bestofjoomla.com/component/x … Itemid,46/
My other favorite site with free templates, and the one that I almost used is called "Joomla Bear." Appropriate, huh? He's got some really great free templates on there that I loved. He gives you the free templates but also does customization, hosts the Joomla website, etc.
And the two websites I got the most help/information from were:
http://www.joomla.org and http://www.howtojoomla.net
Oh and another nice thing about Joomla is that it already has a Blog component built in so you don't have to go to Blogger to open one up. You can just host it on your own website. Or have them (if you use Siteground) download Wordpress for you into the same directory. Wordpress is also Open Source Software and Siteground usually has a Wordpress template to match their Joomla templates. So you can be "coordinated."
And funny you should mention about liking my template. I talked another artist into going from Frontpage to Joomla so we've kind of been on this "journey" together. Actually, it's her husband who is doing her website. He loved my template too after I showed it to her and wanted her to go with it. She said "oh no, Lisa's worked on it too hard." So you're not the only one who has their "eyes" on my template! LOL!
If you need help, I can show you the other templates (there's like 15 of them) that I was considering because they were easy to "manipulate."
Have fun "Joomla-ing!"
Edited to add:
P.S. to Debbie - You have to turn the WYSIWYG editor off to do most of the stuff that I did - especially the widgets on the side. But the "How to Joomla" website totally walks you through the whole thing making it really easy.
Posts: 3,540
There's an Editor??? I was simply saying WYSIWYG like you were saying the KISS system.... What You See Is What You Get. I use Freewebs just so I don't have to do the coding. 
Yes, I'm lazy!
q.D.paToOtieS
LOL! Yes, this software has a WYSIWYG editor associated with it and I think it's called "Tiny Mice" if I'm not mistaken.
Cute, huh?
Lisa,
Thanks for taking the time to provide all of this information. I'm excited to start now. My website is soooooo plain it definitely needs a pick me up. I've tried to get my hubby to do it but he's afraid I'll just complain...now I wonder where he got that idea :crackup:
Hugs,
