Ok, so you've followed our guide on setting up Joomla, but now you're looking at this ugly default template, including Joomla banners and other things you don't want on your site. Unless of course you want that banner for some odd reason.

Joomla comes with a second template already installed by default called 'made your web'. To learn how to enable a different template, I suggest trying to change to 'madeyourweb' now.

• Log in to the administration panel of your Joomla site ( http://www.your.url/administrator )
• In the top menu bar, go to SITE -> TEMPLATE MANAGER -> SITE TEMPLATES. Now you will see the list of installed templates.
• Select the radio button for the 'made your web'  template and click on the button DEFAULT (not the assign button, we'll get to that one later)
• Now open your browser and go to the URL of your site .. presto ! A whole different look for the entire site.
  

Now to install a NEW template, you will first need to download some. Head over to our download section and get some free templates. You do not need to unzip the files, they will be installed AS zip files. Once you have a few you want to try out for your Joomla site, go to :

• Log in to the administration panel of your Joomla site ( http://www.your.url/administrator )
• In the top menu bar, go to INSTALLERS -> TEMPLATES-SITE.
• Click on the button NEW to install a new template
• Click on the button BROWSE to find the file you downloaded
• Click on the button UPLOAD AND INSTALL
• You should now see a message that the installation was succesfull
• You can now choose this new template as your default (see steps above)
  

TROUBLESHOOTING TIPS :

If you are uploading a template and you get an error message like :

Upload template failed :

/httpdocs/media/install_47f601d34d223/index.php does not exist!

or

Upload template failed :

BAD PCL ZIP FORMAT

This almost always means you are uploading a Joomla 1.5 template onto a Joomla 1.0 site. This won't work and you'll need to find a different template or decide to use Joomla 1.5 instead.

OTHER COOL STUFF WITH JOOMLA TEMPLATES :

You can enable a 'module', called the template changer and use it to give your visitors the option to select their favorite templates from the ones you make available to them. This is further explained in the guide 'Using the template changer module'. 

You can also assign different templates to different areas on your site. This is done with the 'assign' button in the template manager mentioned earlier. When you click on it, you will be shown a list of areas on your site (news, blog.. etc.) and you can select where you want this template to be active. This way your site can change its entire look when people enter the news area or some other special area on your site.

There is also a method of creating a PDA / Mobile version of your site. Either on a subdomain (pda.mypage.com) or by auto detecting mobile browsers and just showing them a different template. This is further explained in our guide here ()

You can of course modify any exisiting template. Often the free templates will contain links to the site of the creator of the template. You'll also probably want to edit the graphical logo. For this purpose we have written a guide 'some easy steps to pimp your Joomla templates'. You'll also find 'module positions' explained in that same guide.

Well I hope this was a clear explanation of how Joomla templates work. You should remember that you can always change the template of your site with the click of a button