Joomla has been a good tool for creating a professional database driven website, person should not need to be technical even. So, you decided to use Joomla as the CMS (content management system) for you website. You’ve been working on it for a while, you have some good content, but something is still missing… cool graphics! Let’s face the fact, it doesn’t matter how many great templates you have been downloading, a web site without nice graphics is like a TV show without color. It’s boring and drab and won’t look very visually appealing. You want your site to catch people’s attention and make them say, “Hmm, this looks interesting, I think I’ll check it out”. One of the best ways to do this is to have a good header graphic at the top of the page. In Joomla Template Secrets, I’m teaching how to download more than 3500 joomla templates without hussle. It is always great that we can get as much as templates that we want, but sometimes a simple tweaking is needed for the website graphics.

So, How Do We Create Great Web Graphics for Joomla Websites (or any website):

There are 3 main ways to get header graphics, depending on how much time and money that you have.

1. The expensive way - hire a professional graphic designer to make them for you

2. The cheap way - buy a customizable set of pre-made graphics from the Internet

3. The free way - make them yourself!

 

Option #1: Hire a Professional Graphic Designer
It may be great for big corporations that have a lot of money, but it’s not so practical for small businesses or individuals who make web pages as a hobby. Sure, you might be able to hire a freelance graphic designer who will charge $50 per image or something like that, but even that’s a lot of money for most people.

When I design web sites, I prefer option #2.

Option #2: Buy a Customizable Set of Pre-Made Graphics from Internet

This is a great balance between time and money. It’s easy to find good image packages that cost a lot less than hiring a professional. Such packages typically provide a number of different generic backgrounds and styles so you can pick one that fits the topic of your site. Files are given to you in a format that makes it easy to edit the individual elements of the image, such as the popular Adobe Photoshop .psd format or extensions that GIMP supported.

For example in the image editable file, image elements are organized in layers that can be turned on and off, or changed as you see fit. So you could pick something that you like, change the title and sub-heading to be whatever you want, and then save the new image as a .jpg file for your web page and you’re done! It’s that easy! You can have a nice, professional looking header for your web site in as little as 2 or 3 minutes! All you have to do is spend a little bit of time and money finding a good graphics package to use.

If you have a little more time and want to make something truly original, then you can go with option #3.

Option #3: Do It Yourself

However, it doesn’t mean that you have to do it from ground up. There are many ways to find available graphics from internet and use the freely available software to modify it yourself. Making your own website is not as difficult as you thing and it rewards as well. If you are good at it, you could even go into business for yourself as a freelance graphic designer or make your own graphics package to sell!

Tools that you can use are Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. Adobe Photoshop is a commercial too but it is far more advanced. As a beginner for graphic design, I would suggest that you use GIMP, as it is a free tool yet with lots of great functions.