Previously we have shown you how to install Joomla!, a free CMS web application that you can use for your own site. By default it has a basic Joomla! template enabled. You should ofcourse choose the template that will match your site’s content. In this post I will show you how to change and add templates to the template directory.
To change the template, go to the administrator page by browsing the URL of your site followed by /administrator. For example, http://www.mydomain.com/administrator (change the domain to correspond to your Joomla! host).
Login to the admin page:
The admin page will come up, this is the page where you can control the contents and plugins for your Joomla! page. Click the Extensions menu and then Template Manager:
The list of installed templates will appear. The one with the star icon is the active template:
You can hover on each template name to see the preview of each of them:
To enable a template, click the radio button next to the template and then click the star icon at the upper right hand side of the page:
This will change the template of your Joomla! page. Browse your Joomla’s main page to see the effects of the new template.
Now that you know how to choose templates from the admin page, I will show you how to install free templates that you can download from the web. First look for the template that you want from the web. One of the sources I saw that has good looking templates are located here: http://www.siteground.com/joomla-hosting/joomla-templates.htm
Once you have downloaded the zip file of the template, extract it to the /templates folder of your Joomla! files. If you have done this correctly, you should see the template name under the Template Manager. If you need to transfer to a web hosting service, you can use Filezilla client or WinSCP to connect to it.
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.