There are few people in the country—possibly the world—who are not familiar with Google. Google has become synonymous with a new generation that is used to having all of the information of the Internet at their fingertips, since any topic can be found through the familiar Google search engine. As a project for Stanford graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the world’s most thorough search engine now sets the rules for how web sites are indexed and promoted on the worldwide web. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The word “google” has even been made it into Webster’s Dictionary, officially defined as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.”

For some companies, web sites are a nicety—they exist as a brochure but don’t really drive business. Other companies depend upon their web sites for sales and new client generation to such a large degree that their livelihood is dependent upon their web site.

I wonder if you share an experience I have had—when I meet someone and the connection with them is so strong that I find myself wondering why it took me so long to come across them. Surely someone with whom I see so eye to eye should have been in my circle for decades. Of course, it occurs to me that “decades ago,” I may have not been fully baked and wouldn’t have been the person I would have to be to hit it off so well with the person in question…and the same probably goes for them as well.

I like to think that I am an informed consumer who balances budget and quality, trying to get the most “bang for my buck.” Recently, I came across the web site for an organization called Co-op America, that gave me pause. Now, I must start this writing with full disclosure that I am the driver of an SUV, I don’t do a good job of recycling, and it seems that with a family of four, we still have a bag of trash to discard at least every two days.

There are a lot of great Joomla templates on the web. But there are even more plain old HTML website templates. In this tutorial, I show you step by step how to convert a template from oswd.org into a Joomla template.