There are 2 stages to creating a new article page in Joomla! 1.5.

First create the new article.

Then add it to the navigation bar.

Log in to your admin console with the username and password you have been given and navigate to articles (content – article manager).

In article manager, click the “NEW” green icon on the top-right of the console.

The “New Page” pane appears. Give the page a title.

The alias is what the page is known by in the url and should be short and all in lower-case letters.

Pick a Section. This is just a housekeeping exercise! You can pick “Uncategorised” or pick an existing category. You can create your own category, but this must be done before you create the page. If you are displaying your article in Blog format, then you will need to choose the section and category that fits with the blog layout you have created. This will need to be completed before you can pick the section. If you haven’t done this, you can just make this article uncategorised and then come back and change the section at a later date.

The next step is to type the content of your page in the WYSIWYG editor. You may copy text from your computer into the article, but Do NOT copy text straight from Word into here or you will copy across lots of formatting code. If you want to copy from a Word document it is best to copy it out of Word, into “Notepad” or “WordPad”, then copy it out of there into the editing pane.

Style the text using the “Format” drop-down on the editor. Pick paragraph for the main text or if you want a heading, pick from those on offer (heading 1, heading 2 etc). This ensures that the search engines know that the text is a heading. (Headings should have key words in them wherever possible as key words in heading are given more importance by search engines.) Formatting the text in this way also keeps the styling of your website consistent, which is important for ensuring that it looks professional.

As you work, click the “Apply” green tick icon at the top of the console. This saves what you have done, but keeps the page open for further editing. When you have finished, click “Save” disk icon and the article will be saved and closed, taking you back to the article manager.

Once you have all the text in your new page, you need to set up the parameters for it. Look to the right-hand side of the pane. You will see 3 options:

1) Parameters (Article). Click on this to open and you may choose to assign an author to the article and the access level. This will be public unless you have a member’s section to your website. In that case you would choose registered or special. This would mean that the content would not show for general visitors, but would be showing if someone registered and logged in. You may also set a start and end date and choose a date for the article to automatically be removed from the site if you wish. Leave this as “Finish publishing: Never” if you want it to remain.

2) In the “Parameter (Advanced )” section, you can choose various options for the article, such as whether to show the title, show Author Name, show the date and time it was created, show the date the article was modified, show printer icon next to it, show a pdf icon. These are fairly self-explanatory.
Your website will have had standard parameters created, so if you want your article to conform to these, just leave the options to “Global”.

3) Metadata Information.
This is very important for search engines. You should put in a description for every page.

The description should include key words for the page. It is the short description which comes up under the link to a website in the search engines. Make it around 155 (roughly) characters as Google cuts off anything longer. You should think of it as a brief advert for the article which should be worded to tempt searchers to click on your link.

Keywords are no longer important. Your website will be set up with a global “keywords” which will apply automatically to the article if you do not add any. You may feel it is not worth changing these.

Don’t forget to press “SAVE” when you finish! (Remember, “Apply” saves the page, but keeps it open for further editing)

The next stage is to create the navigation so that visitor may see your article.

You may also need to know how to:

• Add an image to a Joomla! article
• Add a link to a Joomla! article