"Site content is usually our main concern when developing a site, and can directly affect our success."
As we saw in the previous chapter, images can attract visitors and in the first instance itself make them stay on our site. We saw how to make these images more interesting and also how to take full advantage of them. But in the long run, content is what makes our visitors stay or return to our site.
Although we are not going to see how to prepare good content for our site, we will see how to organize them in some interesting ways. We are going to focus on topics, such as:
- Tabs—organizing our contents into tabs
- Article slideshows
- Site search—introducing AJAX searches
Quite interesting, isn't it? Keep reading!
Organizing our content into tabs can be very useful. It provides the ability to have more information placed in minimum amount of space, and is great for news and article introductions. We can also organize the content into slideshows; these work very much like image slideshows, but we will use them to show articles. Site search is as important as having good site content so that our visitors are able to find them. Although Joomla! has a great search feature, we will try to make it a bit more appealing.
Now let's get started!
First, let us start by taking a quick look at how Joomla! organizes and works with content. By default, in version 1.5, Joomla! organizes content into sections, categories, and articles. Sections and categories are used to organize our site content, which is represented by our articles.
Of course, we can have articles placed in uncategorized sections and categories. However, personally, I prefer to create a structure that maintains all of the site's content in an organized manner.
We will now create a section called "News". Navigate to your Joomla! Administrator screen, and then to Content | Section Manager. On this screen, we need to click on the New button, which will open the Section creation screen. On this screen, we can introduce the Section name and save it:
Now, inside this section, we will create two categories. Navigate to Content | Category Manager and click on the New button. Create the following two categories and remember to select News as the section that they belong to:
- Site News
- F.A.Q.
Once created, these categories will be listed as shown in the following screenshot, and as you can see they belong to the News section:
Well, we are now going to create some articles in these categories, just to have some articles to play with. We don't need to create very elaborate articles, just some Lorem Ipsum ones. Create them as you wish and then proceed to the next topic.