Top 10 Joomla Development Mistakes Of Beginners And How to Avoid Them

by Harikrishna Patel Softqubes Technologies

As a beginning Joomla developer, you are bound to commit costly mistakes. That is understandable. But what is not understandable is if you keep on committing the same mistake over and over again. Here are 10 of the most common Joomla web development mistakes committed by beginners and how to avoid them.

Links to external sites open in the same window : The general rule is that all links to external sites should open in a new window. All HTML editors have a functionality for choosing “new window” when creating links. However, for links to your own site, it should open in the same window. Likewise, you need to avoid opening too many windows while the user browses your site.
Not using descriptive file names : Not using descriptive file names is also another common mistake committed by beginning programmers. You can use just about anya filename such as “1.jpg” or “2.jpg” but such names may be hard to find. Making it more descriptive such as “red_rose.jpg” is the way to go. This way, the customer will readily know what the file is even if they do not open it. It can also drive traffic when people are looking for pictures of a red rose.
Not resizing images: One major flaw of Joomla is that it is not able to resize images. What you can do is upload the large image and then edit the size on the HTML Editor by dragging the corners. Failing to resize the image may cause the image to load slowly. Speed is important in ensuring that your customers will stay in your site.
Spaces in File Names: In lieu of a space, use underscore instead. In lieu of a space, use underscore instead. Spaces can result to a messy code and may cause unpredictable problems.
Putting all images in one folder: Joomla has a feature that lets you create new folders and categorize them into topics. Adding images in one folder may cause future difficulties in finding images when you want to add them to your articles.
Not using the standard heading for formatting text: Every Joomla template has a style sheet file with headings for formatting. While the title of your article is already formatted, the rest of the article may require some more headings to break the block of text. When formatting text inside your article, you can use headings. This will result to a clean code and should you decide to change the appearance of the headings, simply open the CSS file and make changes once.
Typing directly into Joomla: Once you login to your Joomla admin, you start a session. By default, one session is set to 15 minutes but you can change it on the global configuration page. Typing directly into Joomla may cause you to end your session before you are done writing even if you save your work. The best thing to do is type it first in Word and then just copy paste.