Mambotastic - The Mambo And Joomla Users Portal

Building a website with Mambo is easy, but its even easier if you know exactly what you need to begin with. This is part I of three articles which aim to inform you of the basic requirements and building blocks of a Mambo site.

The article is directed at new users of Mambo and users who do not neccessarily have a great deal of technical knowledge. If you are already familiar with the concept of Mambo look out for our article on advanced Mambo sites coming out shortly.

The Overview

We'll start at the beginning, Mambo is a piece of software that manages and displays the content or information you want to share with your users or customers about you, your business or a subject, whichever it is it provides a simple way for you to create professional looking websites very simply.

It does this by using templates some of which your can buy, some of which you can download free of charge and some which you can have custom  designed, but people described as template designers.

One of the advantages of Mambo, is that you can start with a free template and build up your website, then you can change the look and feel of your website instantly without having to redesign it. Your information or products are simply displayed in whatever template format you wish. As your business or your web site gains popularity, you can download professional templates for very little money, and there are template clubs from as little as £25 per year which will design new templates and give you access to all of their designs as they create them.

However, should you decide that you want a completely unqie site, that no-one else has, you can opt to have a template designed for you, but you don't have to commision expensive development staff to take all of the information or content from you old site to the new one. In fact it really is as simple as abc to change the entire look of you website with a couple of button clicks.

Later on in this three part article we'll show how to do just that.

You can also modify  existing templates for your own use within the license, so rather than having to worry about how you make your pages look professional, all you  have to worry about is whats going to be on the pages.

Whats more, you  can add as many pages as you like, they will come looking as profesional as the last, WITHOUT NEEDING TO KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM, or learn how to use complex website building tools.

What you will need.....

Either....

Mambo installed with your web space provider, if your web space is provided free then you will have to buy professional web space to host your Mambo CMS, we suggest you look at 1&1 for your webspace, they are a large company with offices in the UK, Germany and the USA and provide reliable, cost effective web space with a whole host of features, you can buy web space containing all of the components required for Mambo CMS from as little at £8.99 per month which includes 3 .co.uk domain names and up to 700 email address.

See our article, 'Installing Mambo on 1&1 Web Space'  for more information on how to setup Mambo CMS on 1&1 webspace.

..or

A local installation of Mambo CMS  on your pc or laptop. see the article 'Installing Mambo CMS on  Windows' for more information on how to install all of the required Mambo CMS components on your local machine.

In part II of this article you will learn how to begin using Mambo to add and organize content and begin formatting you website, the Mambo way.