First, find a company to host your site.  See the Joomla! Resources page.

The second thing you must do is to choose a template.   A template dictates the look and feel of your website.  If your host is not providing you with template options, you may choose a free one online. See the Joomla Resources page.   Your template may look somewhat like the one below:

A. Header.  The header usually appears at the top of the site.  It presents your organization most often by name, a logo, images and a short description.

B. Front Page Content. This is what visitors see when they first open the site so you will want the content of this page to be aesthetically pleasing as well as representative of your organization.  It generally contains information about the organization, graphics and/or important news. See, Front Page Content
tutorial for more information.

C. Modules. Modules in the example are:  Polls, Login Form, the Menu bank and Events Calendar.  Modules are generally in the right or left hand columns.  Modules can be selected to show on every page of your site or just some pages.  They can be ordered according to preference.  The tutorial explains more about modules.

D. Menu items.  Menu items provide links to other pages and/or components on your site.  They can be listed horizontally, vertically, on the left, right, top or bottom depending on the layout of your template.  Since menu items link to content items or components, it stands that those items and/or components must be created before the menu item is created.  More information can be found in the tutorial section, Static Content and Menu Items , Content Items and Menu Items and SubMenu Items.

E. Joomla! Extensions.  The JEvents calendar is one example of the many extension components available.  Others include, perForms, RSGallery2,  and DOCman.  The tutorial section, Joomla! Extensions provides more information.

Your site has both a front end (which is visible to your site visitors) and an administrative back end (where you do your site development).

The front end of your site is accessible at:  http://example.com

The administrative back end is accessible at:  http://example.com/administrator/

The back end is where you, the administrator, will create and make changes to your site. Note the menu bar at the top of the administration site.  (The row of words beginning with 'Home').  It is primarily from this menu bar that you will access the features and functions of your site to create and make changes.

It will look like this:

We recommend that you have both the back end and front end of your site open at the same time when you are working on your site.  This will allow you to see the changes you are making as you create and save them.  With Firefox it is easy to do this by having 2 tabs open.

Note:  The following tutorials will, in places refer to certain text editing tools.  Some of these tools may only be available to you if you are using the JCE Editor extension.  JCE Editor is free and available from http://www.cellardoor.za.net/

The next step is to change your site name.