Free Joomla Templates and Great CSS Advice

Its great to see people in the Joomla community taking the time and effort to build free sites that are genuninely useful resources. Today, I'll highlight two of the very best:

Joomla24.com 

Back in the Mambo days, when I was first investigating Mambo there was one place go to in order to find quality, free templates - Mambohut.com. I spent many hours learning how to design for Mambo by downloading and tearing apart designs from that site. Since the move to Joomla, that site hasn't been update very regularly and so its great so see a new site provide such a comprehensive resource.

One thing that often bugs me about free download sites is the sheer number of Adsense and affilitate banners, blocking easy navigation of the site and often crowded around the "download" button, in order to try and gain a few extra bucks a day. Joomla24.com manages to advertise while making sure that the site is still easy on the eye and intuitive to navigate. They also claim to have 1300 templates available.

JoomlaCSSGuide.com

Until now, when people asked me how to learn and research the default CSS for Joomla, I'd pointed them over to Joomlart's tutorial. In the future, I'll be recommending JoomlaCSSGuide.com which takes the Joomlart concept one step further and breaks down not just the CSS for content items but also all the core components, modules and mambots. Its an excellent site that must have taken quite a bit of work to get ready for launch.

One minor quibble - it would be nice if people launching new sites took the time to build a small "About Us" page. Nothing builds trust quite as quickly as being upfront about how you are.

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Your Comments (12)

Herbert-Jan van Dinther

March 13, 2007

Two very nice sites, with a lot of information, I like Joomla CSS Guide but I need to learn a lot more about Template Building...

If you look at Joomla24, I found them to be the englisch counterpart of www.joomlaos.de which is a website I really love!
But its in German, which is no problem for me, but might be for the Englisch Speaking community.

But if you go to www.joomlaos.de you will find the same tewmplates, the previeuws use the same www.joomlademo.de for the live prewiews.

The best part of the German site for me is that there are also downloads and demo's of Components, Modules and Plugins and more...

You don't need to learn German to Browse around and find what you are looking for :-)

Hmm, I might have some work to do on my own "About Me" pages...

Good post, again!

Steve Burge

March 13, 2007

Hi Hummerbie

Thanks for the link to joomlademo.de. The guys who run that and www.joomlaos.de really must have put a lot of work into their sites.

I like the fact that the put the template changer in the center of the page. When I go to some template demo sites such as www.csszengarden.com, I end up chasing the template changer all over the page as the menu positions change.

AMD Phenom

July 02, 2007

I mught use Joomla for my next AMD site and I really like the template provided at this address. Cheers

David Towers

November 15, 2007

Unfortunately JoomlaCSSGuide.com is down at the moment as its being upgraded... Hope it will be up again soon.

Klaus Nitsche

November 15, 2007

I doubt it, David ... the site has been offline for quite a long period now. (I think in the range of several months.)

Kind regards,
Zorro

Steve Burge

November 21, 2007

Interestingly, the whole of JoomlaCSSGuide.com is available via Archive.org

I might email the developer and ask if he's getting the site back, and if not, could we make it publicly available?

Klaus Nitsche

November 21, 2007

Great idea Steve!

Steve Burge

January 03, 2008

Just got an email from the site's creator ... JoomlaCSSGuide.com is back online.

Steve Burge

January 03, 2008

Ah - one caveat .... its become a commercial site.

David Towers

January 03, 2008

Nice to see its back online. Looks very web 2.0y... Shame that it requires membership to see the Joomla CSS Guide. Doesn't seem like there is any valuable info on there now unless your a member.

willy

September 21, 2008

Another great site for Joomla templates : free joomla 1.5 templates
It is possible to change template's parameters live and see the results in real time !

Sbu

July 17, 2009

thank you