Lesson 2 - Organizing Your Content

Your Simplweb site uses the Joomla Content Management System (CMS). The primary function of a CMS is to organize and present all the content in your site. It does this through content articles. These discrete pieces of content must be organized into a two level hierarchy called sections andcategories.

To get a better idea of how a Simplweb site can be organized, let’s make a sitemap for an imaginary site. Our site is one for a company called Widget Inc. It sells widgets in both blue and green. This example could be easily generalized into any sort of “brochure” site for a small company.

A sitemap is a standard planning tool used by web designers and is critical for a web site. It’s often shown as a tree diagram showing all the pages in the site. Figure 1 shows an example.

Figure 1
A Website Sitemap

In this sitemap, each web page is represented by a box; the lines are links within the site. A sitemap represents the architecture (links) through a site rather than content organization. It is still a useful planning tool for organizing the site, however. In Figure 1, there are seven pages; from an organizational point of view, it seems like there are four main paths in the site:

To view the rest of this tutorial, you must be a Simplweb subscriber. Please login or signup for a website.