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Once you have your server space, your software, and of course your ideas on how you want the site to look, you're ready to get started building your web site. If you have decided to go with a CMS the first thing to do is familiarize yourself with the program and how it works, and we have a couple of suggestions.

If you have built "page-driven" web sites previously to working with Joomla or some other CMS, it's going to take a little different mindset...Content Management Systems are menu-driven, not page-driven. It's a difficult concept to understand at first, but there are really no "pages" - there are menu links, and these links create pages on-the-fly by adding content, menus, images, and so forth. Go through it some and you'll get the hang of it...and you will discover that it is a very powerful system, and when you grasp it you'll never go back to plain old pages again.

The other thing we would highly recommend is to learn some CSS. This stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and allows you to style all the elements in your site consistently. The styling in a CSS file (that you can work with in ConTEXT) will allow you to change all the styles of heads, text, menu links, or other elements in one place, and it will be reflected throughout your site. This is a big time saver, and also makes sure you site is styled consitently...no more remembering to change every element on every page to make the site look cohesive.

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As we mentioned earlier, there are probably thousands of free templates available for your site, and you may be able to find one that looks exactly how you want it to, but knowing some CSS will allow you to tweak the site and get it just right. Yes, you will have to learn some "programming" in a sense, but it's well worth your time to learn a little about CSS, and it's really not difficult to learn. One tool that has made things much easier is Web Developer Toolbars for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. These plug-ins for your browser allow you to view the CSS selectors for the elements in each page right in your browser...a big time-saver in styling your site and finding hidden problems.

One more thing about Open Source software...because of the very nature of this software, it doesn't come with support as does commercial software. Considering the support of many companies, this isn't always a bad thing, but if you do need help most of it comes through forums of users . Sometimes it takes a little digging, and can be frustrating, but there are lots of users on these forums that will help you, and most of the time your question has already been asked and answered and just takes a some searching on your part to solve your problem.

There are literally millions of places out on the web that can help you build your own site, and it's impossible for us to cover even a fraction of them here. But we hope this can at least get you started, and maybe give you some insight into publishing your own site on the web.
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