Well today I am stuck again at the 11th spot in the search results for the “best web designer in Canada”. My initial reaction was disappointment, but this turned around, once I noticed that the previous 10 are the same, and I am still the 11th. Now that I have knocked out 132, 999,989 sites/pages to get here, I am happy to still be here. This is especially so, as I have passed many other “SEO specialty companies” to get here. I may just need to do some more research and get more creative to move the last 10 places.
Today I want to talk about templates some more. I realize I may have bashed this to death yesterday, without really explaining what templates are and how they work in the Joomla CMS.
Templates are not the rigid structured designs that attempt to cookie cutter a site into a preset design. Today templates are a system that manages the presentation of a website, allows site-wide changes to be managed easily, and allows sophisticated customization to the page by page display and arrangement of content.
Templates are a group of files that manage the overall look of the site. There are 2 main files in a template, the index.php file that handles the code and the ordering of the modules on the page, and the css file that handles the content placement, site images and colors. These can be broken down into a number of subfiles, and better template companies do this to further group and segregate functions.
The best type of templates map out a web page into a large number or areas, that the designer or site owner can activate or deactivate simply by inserting an extension into them. Typically these are modules that provide information or functions to the user. Here is an example of a great web page layout. Each module position automatically collapses if there is nothing put in it, and the page adjusts to provide or use the space. The module containers are identified in the index file, and then positioned and designed in the css file.
This is a pretty general explanation of the template system, but my goal is simply to help you understand that templates and template design are very important in what they offer that you can do with them. In a well designed template, changing the colors and images can easily be accomplished if needed.
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