A Joomla template is a set of files that contain the HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code that defines what your website will look like. HTML is the code used to build web pages and CSS is the code used to style them. You could say that HTML is the bricks and mortar of your site, whereas CSS provides the wallpaper and paint. Let's see how this works.

Without any CSS styles applied, your web browser would display a typical Joomla site as shown in the following screenshot. Although the screenshot is too small for you to be able to discern the screen text, you'll notice that just plain text and images are shown here with minimal styling.

The same content is shown with CSS styles applied in the following screenshot. Through CSS codes, the overall page layout and design is added.

Actually, a template contains more than pure HTML and CSS codes. After all, Joomla has to know where the dynamic content should be placed within the HTML page structure. That's why a template...