Chapter 1. Let's Start Making a Better Site—Images

"Pictures are worth a thousand words; images are one of the best ways to make our site interesting and grab our visitors' attention."

Although some people will agree with this statement more than others, the truth is that images have been one of the most important aspects of websites to date. From images incorporated into the layout to images used in content, they all help to make our site look interesting and appealing. And that's very, very important. We can have the best content, products, and articles; however, if our site is not appealing enough, our visitors will leave before we can even show them all of our site's great features.

If you stop to think about it, this makes a lot of sense. A good looking site denotes a good quantity of effort being put into it, and in the end it gives a sense of seriousness to our site or business, which makes our visitors more confident.

In this chapter we are going to work with images, and will make use of some Joomla! modules to give our site the extra appeal that it needs.

These are some very nice additions for any site. If you don't have a live site, you can try them with the sample template that is provided with the book code. For now, our site looks similar to the following screenshot:

As you can see, there is a lot of work to be done on the layout mock-up. Let's see an overview of what we are going to cover in this chapter.

First, we will see how Joomla! handles images by default, without the help of any module or extension, using just Joomla! and images. Then, we will see some modules and extensions that will help us to:

• Add an image slideshow to our site

• Incorporate image pop ups—a great way of making our images stand out from our contents

• Create galleries

Through all of the examples in this book, we will look at jQuery-powered extensions to help us in our work. For now, let's stop talking and start working on our site.