In this tutorial we will be addressing the most basic need of any joomla website.  Adding new pages.

If you want a plain page without all the joomla fancy bits then here is how to do it...

1. Create an article
2. Add your meta data
3. Add a link to your menu

Step 1 - Creating your article

If you look at your top menu it should appear like this:

Site | Menus | Content | Components | Extensions | Tools | Help

Whenever we reference this top menu we will tell you which button to click by displaying the following guide.

Content >>> Articles:

This is the reference to the menu item you need to click.

So we have gone into Content >>> Articles:

Now we have a list of all your sites current articles or pages. At the top right we have a button that allows us to create new articles/pages

click this button and write in your page content in the wysiwyg editor. (its just like word)

Tip. before you continue to the next highlight the page text and copy it to your clipboard (trust me it can be usefull)

Step 2 - Adding Metadata

Look on the right had site of your screen and you have a drop down menu called "Metadata Information" in here you have options to set what the search engines see when they index your website. Fill this in and be aware of the following information

• Description should be no more than 156 Letters
• Keywords should be kept simple and be similes of your content keywords and try to limit to 56 Letters
  
• Robots options are long and have many uses INDEX, FOLLOW for most of your content is fine (or just leave it blank). Things like terms and conditions and policies should generally be NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW - I'll explain what the different options for the robots field is in a future article.

A lot of people say that meta data is irevelant these days, I always like to fill it in as I'm a bit of an SEO freek. If you don't want to fill it in just leave it blank,  its not going to be detrimental if your content is good.

A great tool for checking your letter count.

Step 3 Linking to the Article/Page

Now you have created your page/article we need to enable users to find it. We access this part of joomla by going to Menus >>> Main Menu (or whatever menu you want to publish the link to)

Ok this page is pritty similar to the Content >>> Articles: page (you will find that a lot in joomla)

Using the same "New" button at the top right we can add a menu link:

• Once you have clicked "new" you will be asked what type of menu item you want to create. To keep things simple lets just work on the assumption we want to only add a single new page to the site. 9 times out of 10 thats what you want to do anyway.
• So we need to Choose "Articles" then we will have various options for displaying articles for a simgle page choose "Article Layout"
• In the next page you can give your menu item a name and choose which article we want it to link too using the button on the right.
• Once you have set all the parameters you can click "Save" at the top right and so long as your link is "Published" it will appear on the menu.