To make your Joomla! website unavailable to visitors, replacing it with a simple message, do this:

1. Log in to the Administrator back-end. To learn how to do this read: Logging in or out of the Administrator back-end.
2. Click on the Global Configuration button in the main Control Panel or click the Site → Global Configuration menu item  or System → Global Configuration in .
3. There are so many configuration options that they need to be divided into separate groups or tabs. The Site tab, it should be the default first view displayed, if not click on the tab.
4. Find where it says Site Offline and change the radio button from No to Yes  or click the Yes button in .
5. Optional: Change the Offline Message to give your visitors some explanation about why your website is unavailable.
6. Click the Save toolbar button to implement the new settings:
   • The Save toolbar button will save your changes and but leave you in Global Configuration.
   • The Save and Close button will save your changes and return you to the Administrator Control Panel.
7. You should see a message confirming the settings have been changed.
   • If you see an error message refer to Cannot save Global Configuration changes.

In order to add your pages to its database, a search engine (such as Google) will send out so-called crawlers, spiders or bots to harvest the text on your site. These bots cannot harvest things that are created by Javascript, or 'see' images (though they do check alt tags) and the don't play well with Flash files if at all.

While all these things may make the site look better, they do little to nothing in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO) without adding descriptive information about those resources which are visible to a search engine (but not necessarily visible to your site visitors).

It is important that your website can be found by people who are looking for its content, therefore you must serve content to search engine 'bots' in a way that they can interpret, analyse and identify how relevant it is to the search query.

For this to happen, you need to bring to the attention of the 'bots' important information about the page using various techniques detailed below - almost like a 'signpost' telling the 'bot' what the page contains. It will then compare what you tell it the page is about, with what it finds by itself, and run various algorithms to check if the page is in fact relevant. It also runs other checks to make sure that you are not trying to cheat the system using 'black hat' or 'grey hat' tactics to make your page rank higher.

It is also possible to add contextual information to your website which helps the 'bot' to understand the context of the information it is indexing, ultimately resulting in more appropriate search results pages when people are searching for topics.

If you create a new menu item type Category blog or Featured articles, a set of Intro texts will be displayed with Read More links on that page. By clicking on the Read More link you will get to the full article view.

It can be useful to restrict access to the full article view for not registered visitors and leave just the intro texts readable to public. To restrict access to full article view, do the following:

Editing Restricting access to Articles individually

1. Log in to the Administrator back-end.
2. Go to Content > Article Manager.
3. Edit the article, set the Access Level for the article with Read More link to Registered (simply click the Public link in the Access Level column).
4. On the menu item, tab Advanced options section Article options.
5. Set the Show Unauthorized Links to Yes and Save the settings.

Editing Restricting access to Articles Globally

1. Log in to the Administrator back-end.
2. Set the article(s) or Category(ies) to view level Registered
3. Go to Content > Article Manager >> Options

Settings for all Articles are referred to as Global Settings and the location for the settings are found in the Article Manager, and then clicking on Options.

To remove the author name, creation date and time and modified date and time from all Articles:

1. Open the Article Manager.
2. Click on the Parameters icon near the top right of your screen.
3. Locate the Author Name, Created Date and Time and Modified Date and Time drop down fields in the Parameters list and change to Hide as required.
   • Hide: Hides the information globally.
   • Show: Displays the information globaly.
4. Click the Save.

These settings apply wherever "Use Global" is selected in the Article's parameters or menu item's parameters.

Log into the back-end of your site (www.your-site.com/administrator/)

Click on: Extensions -> Extension Manager

You see the page "Extension Manager"

From here you can install your Templates, Plugins, Modules, Components and Languages. You have three options:

1. Install from Web - (select an extension listed on the Joomla! Extension Directory)
2. Upload Package File - (select a package from your PC, upload and install it)
3. Install from Directory - (enter the path where the package is located on your webserver)
4. Install from URL - (enter the URL to the package)

Option 4 does everything for you, your environment needs to be properly configured to allow this. Option 2 requires you to download the extension to your PC. Option 3 requires you to unzip and move the folders/files to your webserver. All options require the webserver to have write access to the webspace.

Here, we choose the second method: Upload Package File

Select the package from your PC and click the button "Upload File & Install"

Template style is a feature introduced in  that allows users to assign different template styles to individual menu items. By default, Joomla! assigns a template style to all menu items upon installation. A yellow star indicates the default template style in use. A default template style can be partially or completely overridden by assigning different template styles to the desired menu items in order to obtain a different look for their respective pages.

A template style can be assigned to menu items one of two ways.

• Template manager Extensions → Template Manager
• Editing a menu item under Menus → Menu Name → Menu item