It’s time to make room for growth. Your client has a big pile of information on ugly art that they want to present to the public. You are asked to design a site framework that makes it easy to add more content, while at the same time keeps it easy for visitors to quickly find their way through the site.
Can you do that? You most certainly can! Joomla! allows you to build sites of all sorts and sizes, whether they consist of just a few pages or thousands of them. If you plan ahead and start with a sound basic structure, you’ll be rewarded with a site that’s easy to maintain and extend. In this article, we’ll review the site you’ve just built and look at the different ways the content can be structured—and rearranged, if need be.
To lay the groundwork for your site, you won’t use Joomla!. The back of a napkin will do fine. Draw up a site map to lay out the primary content chunks and their relationships. View your site from a user’s perspective. What do you think your visitors will primarily look for, and how can you help them find things fast and easily?
To create a site map, first collect all information you plan on having on your website and organize it into a simple and logical format.
As site maps come, this is a very basic one. For the most part, it’s just one level deep. Introducing Ugly Paintings and Mission are basic web pages (articles). Activities is a section that allows the visitor to browse two other categories. Contact Us is a contact form page. This structure was good enough for a basic website, but it won’t do if SRUP wants to expand their site.
Let’s make some room for growth. Imagine your client’s planning to add an indefinite amount of new content, so there’s a need for additional content containers. They have come up with the following list of subjects they want to add to their site:
What’s the best way to organize things? Let’s figure out which content fits which type of container.
Step 1: You’ll probably want to create a separate News section. News should be a top level item, a part of the site’s main menu.
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Step 2: The information on the SRUP founders fits in a new section ‘About SRUP’. |
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Step 3: Both Reviews and Facts can be categories in a new general section on ‘Ugly Paintings’. The existing article ‘Introducing Ugly Paintings’ could be moved here (or dropped). |
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You’ve laid a solid foundation for your site—on paper. Before you actually start using Joomla! to create sections and categories, create a structure for the content that you have in mind. Basically, no matter how big or small your website is, you’ll organize it just like the example you’ve just seen. You’ll work from top to bottom, from the primary level to the lower levels, defining content groups and their relations. Bear in mind, though, that there will certainly be more than one way to organize your information. Choose an organization that makes sense to you and your visitors, and try to keep things lean and clean. A complex structure will make it harder to maintain the content, and eventually—when building menus—it will make it harder to design clear and simple navigation paths for your visitors.
Tips on choosing sections
Let’s have a closer look at our new site map and identify the Joomla! elements. This—and any—Joomla! site is likely to consist of five types of content.
The following are the content types in our SRUP site map:
| Obviously, the top level item will be the home page. |
| The main content groups we can identify as sections and categories. This small site has four sections, three of which contain two categories. |
| Each of the categories hold actual content: this is what will end up in Joomla! as articles. |
| In this site map, there is one article that doesn’t really belong in any category: the Mission Statement page. Every site will have one or two of those independent articles. In Joomla!, you can add these as uncategorized articles. |
| Finally, there’s one item that represents a very different type of content. In the site map above, a grey background indicates an item containing special functionality. In this case this is a contact form. Other examples are guest books, order forms, photo galleries. |
Basically, that’s all there is to a Joomla! site. When you’ve got your site outlined like this, you won’t meet any surprises while building it. You can transform any amount of content and functionality into a website, step by step.
How do you turn a site map into a website?
If you’ve got your site blueprint laid out, you probably want to start building! Now, what should be the first step? What’s the best, and fastest, way to get from that site map on the back of your napkin to a real-life Joomla! site? In this book, we’ll work in this order:
And what about the special content stuff?
You’ll notice that in the above list we’ve summed up all sorts of “classic content”, such as articles, home pages, overview pages, and menus linking it all. We haven’t yet mentioned one essential part of the site map, the special goodies. On a dynamic website you can have more than just plain old articles. You can add picture galleries, forms, product catalogues, site maps, and much, much more. It’s important to identify those special pages from the beginning, but you’ll add them later using Joomla!’s components and extensions. That’s why we’ll first concentrate on building a rock-solid foundation; later we’ll add all of the desired extras.
Let’s start with step one now, and get our site organized!
To create a section, navigate to Content | Section Manager | New.
To make a new category, you’ll use the Category Manager instead. Just add a title for your new section or category and click on Save. You’ve created a perfectly workable section or category with the default settings (or parameters as Joomla! likes to call them).
Your client was happy with the initial site structure you designed, but now their website is evolving, there’s a need for more content containers. Let’s add a news section first:
Now, add a category to the new section. We’ll call this category General News:
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