What is a CMS? broadly speaking a CMS is a system used to manage the content of a Website, it supports the creation, management, publishing, of information to your website.

Joomla! is a Content Management System (CMS) that you can use to build websites and other online applications. Joomla! is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody. it is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. You can Download it ...here
This Tutorial will guide you through the process of installing joomla on your web server.

First off download the joomla zip package to your hard drive. Before you splash out on a hosting service its a good idea to install joomla on a local web server and test it out, you can find instructions on how to do that here.

Minimum System Requirements to install joomla as found on the joomla website

To successfully install and use Joomla! you must have a fully operational web server (Apache is the optimum), a database (MySQL is the optimum) and the server side scripting language PHP together with specific modules that are activated within PHP for MySQL, XML, and Zlib functionality amongst others. If you are not sure your server supports all the above contact your hosting company to make sure before installing joomla to your server. Hostgator has all the features you need to install and run joomla CMS.

We will first setup a database on our server that joomla will use, login to your control panel and click the mysql icon.

On the next screen enter a name for your joomla database and click create database, ok now we have our database set up we can start to install joomla.
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Are first job is to upload the zip file to our web server, if you are using hostgator login to your control panel and click on file manager.

This will open the file manager then click on the public_HTML folder. you will see a link at the top of the page, click on upload files, browse to the joomla zip that you downloaded and click on upload file, when the upload is finished click on the zip file and in the top right of the page you will see a list of operations for the file, click on extract, this will extract all files to your server, we are now ready to install joomla.

Now using your browser I recommend firefox, navigate to your website http://www.yoursite.com if all went well you will see the joomla installation screen, select your language and click next.

The first list on your pre-installation check are all required for a minimum install if any are not met (in red) then you will not be able to continue with the install, you may need to upgrade your hosting package or change it completely, I recommend hostgater. The second list are recommended settings but Joomla! will still operate if your settings do not quite match the recommended.

Next up is the GNU General Public License read through and click on next.

Ok we now need to fill in our database information nine times out of ten the hostname will almost always be “localhost” the user name and password will have been sent to you when you signed up for your hosting. Next we need to insert the database name that we created for Joomla on our server and click next.

Next up is the configuration page, give your site a name and enter your email and desired password, click on install sample data. Installing this is strongly recommended If you are learning joomla!, leave everything else as it is and click on next, if all went well you will see the finished page.

You now have a working Joomla! CMS installed...