Something easy and simple that I learned recently from a good friend was how to keep simple code clean in Joomla! Prior to learning these simple tricks, I would have been using a WYSIWYG Editor (What You See Is What You Get) in the back-end of Joomla! and this editor is great for using when first being introduced to Joomla! However the WYSIWYG Editor will not keep your code nice and clean, in-fact when you see the html code it will look like the "space" and "return" keys never existed.

Using the editor is straightforward and kind of like vanilla. You know how everyone likes vanilla but it is not very ones top choice; well the same goes for the editor. Now if you saw what plain html looked like you might say it looks... plain, but in fact seeing html code that is done right is actually quite satisfying.

Well how do you get your code looking that way? With practice of course. Start by getting yourself familiar with basic tags. Learning the basics of good code is a great way to being able to see where paragraphs end, an images placement in an article, hyper links to other sites and so forth. Here are just a couple of tags that I first picked-up:

<p>-paragraph</p> <h1>-heading</h1>
<strong>-bold</strong> <em>-italic</em>

Secondly, I would recommend following others around you who have been writing code for quite some time. If you have good people around you who have been doing this for a while make sure to ask them if you’re on the right track every now and then. The same friend that happened to show me a better way of organizing my code has also been great about blogging on proper code.

Above all you just have to just stick with it. Writing code is not hard but writing good code requires thought and some good research. For some the researching is never done and that's just fine for those people but keep in mind that there is always something new to learn and once you have picked up a good understanding of code you will never want to go back to vanilla.