Grouping content – a crash course on site organization
To lay the groundwork for your site, you won't use Joomla. The back of a napkin will do fine. Draw up a plan: a site map showing 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 quickly and easily?
Designing a site map
To create a site map, first collect all the information that you plan on having on your website and organize it into a simple and logical format. Let's take another look at the CORBA website you built in the previous chapter. The following diagram shows a basic outline of the site you have created so far:
As far as site maps go, this is a very basic one. News, Art Lectures, and Club Meetings are categories that hold several articles on these three topics. Mission is a basic web page (an article). Contact Us is a contact form page. This structure was good enough...