Congratulations! You have a Joomla site! Joomla makes it easy to build a website just the way you want it and keep it simple to update and maintain.

Joomla is a flexible and powerful platform, whether you are building a small site for yourself or a huge site with hundreds of thousands of visitors. Joomla is open source, which means you can make it work just the way you want it to.

Your installation includes sample data, designed to show you some of the options you have for building your website. In addition to information about Joomla! there are two sample "sites within a site" designed to help you get started with building your own site.

The first site is a simple site about Australian Parks. It shows how you can quickly and easily build a personal site with just the building blocks that are part of Joomla. It includes a personal blog, weblinks, and a very simple image gallery.

The second site is slightly more complex and represents what you might do if you are building a site for a small business, in this case a Fruit Shop.

In building either style site, or something completely different, you will probably want to add extensions and either create or purchase your own template. Many Joomla users start by modifying the templates that come with the core distribution so that they include special images and other design elements that relate to their site's focus.

As you make your Joomla! site you will control the details of the display using options also referred to as parameters. Options control everything from whether the author's name is displayed to who can view what to the number of items shown on a list.

Default options for each component are changed using the Options button on the component toolbar.

Options can also be set on an individual item, such as an article or contact and in menu links.

If you are happy with how your site looks, it is fine to leave all of the options set to the defaults that were created when your site was installed. As you become more experienced with Joomla you will use options more.

Joomla means All Together, and it is a community of people all working and having fun together that makes Joomla possible. Thousands of people each year participate in the Joomla community, and we hope you will be one of them.

People with all kinds of skills, of all skill levels and from around the world are welcome to join in. Participate in the Joomla.org family of websites (the forum is a great place to start). Come to a Joomla! event. Join or start a Joomla! Users Group. Whether you are a developer, site administrator, designer, end user or fan, there are ways for you to participate and contribute.