A friend of mine runs a small accounting practice and needed a website. Budget: zero. Timeline: a week. I told them I'd use Joomla. Seven days later we had a site live. Here's the daily log of what I actually did, and what I'd redo if I could rewind.
Day 1 — Install, plan, and the first surprise
I'd budgeted two hours for the install. It took 45 minutes. Joomla 5's installer is genuinely better than older versions; the days of fighting with database connection strings are largely over. I had a working back-end before lunch.
Then I spent the rest of the day planning the site structure. This was the part I'd underestimated. Joomla's strength — its flexibility — is also its trap. There are six ways to put a page on the internet (article, single article menu item, category blog, category list, custom HTML module, custom component). Picking the right one for each section matters.
The structure I settled on:
- Homepage — featured articles module + custom HTML
- Services pages — single article menu items
- About — single article
- Blog — category blog menu item
- Contact — custom form (RSForm! Pro free version)
Day 2 — Template hunt
I'd planned to use a paid template. Instead I spent four hours testing free options and ended up with Helix Ultimate. It's actually free, actively maintained, and comes with a layout builder that handles 80% of what most small business sites need.
What I wish I'd known: don't download more than two templates to compare. The setup time eats real hours. I tested five. Three got uninstalled.
Day 3 — Content first, design later
Before touching any visual customisation, I wrote all the content. Eight pages of real copy. This is the trick that saves entire days: don't design what you don't know yet. With the content in place, the design choices become obvious instead of speculative.
By end of day 3, all eight pages had real content. The site was ugly but the words were right.
Day 4 — Layout and styling
This is the visual day. Helix Ultimate's SP Page Builder handled most of the work — I built the homepage in maybe two hours. The other pages were templated from there. The trick: build the homepage first, lock the visual decisions, then template the rest.
I burned an hour fighting with the navigation menu styling. The CSS overrides I needed were in three different places. Joomla's template hierarchy is its own subject; I'll write up the menu fix separately.
Day 5 — The contact form rabbit hole
I'd planned 30 minutes for the contact form. It took four hours. RSForm! Pro's free version works but the documentation is thin. The reCAPTCHA setup specifically tripped me up — I had it generating tokens but the form rejected them. Solved with a Stack Exchange answer from 2019 (which still works).
Lesson: contact forms in any CMS are an underestimated time sink. Always budget more than you think.
Day 6 — SEO, sitemap, and the basics
Installed JCH Optimize for performance, OSMap for sitemap, sh404SEF for URL handling. Three free extensions, all of which earn their place on every Joomla site I build. Set up Google Search Console verification, submitted the sitemap, set up basic schema markup.
This is the day where most amateur Joomla sites stop being amateur. The visible site looks the same; the technical foundation is suddenly real.
Day 7 — Go live, fix things, hand off
DNS pointed at the new server. SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt. Final checks: forms work, all pages load, no PHP errors in the log, all internal links resolve. Then I sat with my friend for an hour walking through the back-end so they could update text themselves.
The site has been live for six months at the time of writing. Zero issues. Zero updates needed beyond the routine Joomla minor version bumps.
The total budget
- Hosting: $4/month
- Domain: $12/year
- SSL: $0 (Let's Encrypt)
- Theme: $0 (Helix Ultimate free)
- Extensions: $0 (all free)
- My time: ~28 hours across 7 days
Total cost to go live: $16 first year, $4/month after. For a real eight-page small-business website.
What I'd do differently
- Plan the site structure on paper first. The day-1 planning paid back in days 4-5.
- Write content before touching design. The single biggest time saver.
- Budget more for the contact form. Always.
- Stop comparing templates after the first two. The marginal benefit drops fast.
The thing I'm glad I did
Documented every step in a notes file as I went. By day 7, I had the basis of every other tutorial on this site. If you're building a Joomla site for the first time, do the same — your future tutorials, troubleshooting notes, and client documentation are all easier when you wrote them down at the time.
