How To Update Your Joomla 2.5 Website Content

Click the below links for easy step-by-step instructions on how to:

Looking for Joomla 1.5 instructions? Click here: How To Update Your Joomla 1.5 Website Content

How to Log into Your Website

1. Open a web browser
2. Go to your administrator login page
3. Enter your login details and click the “Log In” button

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How to Administer Your Website

The screen you are first presented with has the main menu on the main area of the screen.  You can return to this screen at any time by going to “Site” in the top left hand side of the screen, and selecting “Control Panel”.

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How to Edit Your Website Content

To edit your Website content, click on the Article Manager

Select the page you wish to edit by clicking on the page’s title name.

TIP: If your website has a large number of pages, you can filter by page name (in the top left-hand corner shown above).

The Article Window

From the Article window you can:

1. Change the Page Title (this is not recommended for beginner users, as it can have knock on effects on your menus and other pages).
2. Publish or Unpublish the page (i.e. show or hide it on your website)
3. Change your Content (the writing on your webpages)
   1. NOTE:  Never copy normal text directly into this window, as it will keep the original formatting.  Instead, copy into a text editor such as Notepad first, or convert into plain text (which removes any formatting) and then copy into this window, so that the website page formatting is maintained.

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How to Create a Hyperlink

1. Highlight the text or image you wish to make into a hyperlink (or button) and click the “Insert/editLink” button
2. “Link URL”: Define where you would like the link/button to redirect/point to (e.g. www.webholism.com)
3. “Title”: Define a “Title” if you wish.  WebHolism would recommend to always define an appropriate Title which describes the link accurately, as this can help to improve your search engine ranking
4. Click “Insert”

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How to Remove a Hyperlink

1. Highlight the existing hyperlink text and then click the “Unlink” button

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How to Upload an Image

Before uploading your images you will need to prepare them.  You may be starting off with very large images which will need to be resized to the appropriate size before you upload them to your website.

Your images (depending on where they are placed on your website) should be a maximum of 910 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall, and may be much smaller depending on the design of your website.  Any larger than this and you may find that users/customers with lower resolution monitors cannot see the image in one go as it will be too big for their screen (especially true with smartphones if you do not have a mobile/responsive design website).

You can easily resize your images using image software such as Photoshop or a good free alternative such as GIMP from www.gimp.org. There is a simple guide on how to scale (reduce the size of) an image using GIMP here.

As well as resizing your images, it is very important to use Save for Web and Devices (in PhotoShop this can be found here: File -> Save for Web and Devices), and set quality to High (60%).  This can easily reduce file size by 75% without impacting visible quality.

Unprepared images can be bad for your website for numerous reasons including:

• Poor user experience.  Large images take a long time to load, and your user/customer will have to wait for the large image to load.
• Slow website.  One large image on a page can slow the whole page loading time, which can be very irritating for users.
• Excessive bandwidth consumption.  Every time a user loads your large image, it takes up bandwidth, which is often a limited monthly supply.  When your bandwidth runs out, your website goes offline.
• SEO impact.  Slow page load times hurt your website’s SEO.

1. Click the “Image” button in the bottom left hand side of the window
2. Click the “Choose File” button in the bottom left hand side of the window
3. Browse to the image you wish to upload
4. Select the image
5. Click the “Start Upload” button

If you then wish to add your newly uploaded image to your webpage, select your new image and click the “Insert” button.

Once this is done, you will then be able to view and delete any unwanted images by selecting the Media Manager button from the control panel.

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How to Add an Image – Basic

1. Click in the content where you wish the image to be inserted
2. Click the “Image” button in the bottom left hand side of the window
3. Select the image you wish to use (the “Image URL” box will automatically update with the file location)
4. Enter in a useful description of the image in the “Image Description” and “Image Title” boxes.  This counts towards your SEO, so remember to describe the image truthfully, and to the best of your ability.
5. Click the “Insert” button in the top right hand corner

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How to Add an Image – Advanced

1. Complete the “How to Add an Image – Basic” instructions above
2. You should now be in the main window for your article, with your page content in the main white content area.
3. Select the image you wish to work on by clicking on it
   
4. Click the icon with the tree image on it
5. Select the Appearance tab
6. Configure the following options if desired (note how the box on the right changes with your updates):
   • Alignment: where you want your image to sit in relation to the text around it.  Play around with these options to see what you like most
   • Vertical Space: the distance (in pixels) you want between the top/bottom ofyour image
     and the surrounding text
   • Horizontal Space: the distance (in pixels) you want between the left/right of yourimage and the surrounding text
   • Border: if you would like a border around your image, how thick do you want it to be (in pixels)
7. When finished, click the “Update” button in the bottom left hand corner
8. Review how your image looks in the content, and repeat the above instructions if change is desired.

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How to Remove an Image

1. Select the image by clicking on it
2. Push the delete or backspace button on your keyboard

To delete an image permanently from your website (to free up space, and keep your website light and SEO friendly):

1. Go to Content -> Media Manager
2. Find the relevant image and click the little red “x” by each image you wish to delete
3. For multiple images, you can tick the relevant image boxes and push the delete button in the top right menu
4. Note: You can only delete a folder when it is empty.

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How to Change an Image

1. Select the image by clicking on it
2. Click the icon with the tree image on it
3. Follow the “How to Add an Image – Basic” or “How to Add an Image – Advanced” instructions

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