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. Let's have a look again at the SRUP website you built in the last chapter. The following is the basic outline of the site you've created up to now:
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...