One of the great advantages of having a Joomla Content Managed website is the facility for you to continue adding articles as and when you wish.

However as your website grows you need to keep a firm eye on the structure

Remember to capitalise on the strength of your CMS.

Avoid big long articles that ramble about a variety of subjects.  If you have some content that is about four different subjects consider publishing four succinct articles with their own specific titles.

Avoid creating menus that link to a single article – instead you nearly always should be creating menu items that link to a Category or Section.

Let’s take the example that you have two new pieces of News and a couple of answers to two Frequently Asked Questions.

Your website should already be setup with a Menu item that links to a Category Blog layout that shows all articles in the News Category (probably ordered by the most recently published article at the top)

You could also have an FAQs Section with various Categories of FAQs like Charges, Outlets, Services, Clients.  So you could structure your website to show an FAQs Menu as a Section List with some introduction about the FAQs Section and a self creating dynamic list of categories below.  When the Visitor clicks the link to the Services Category a dynamic list of individual articles about each Service is presented.

Once your Sections, Categories and Related Menus to these have been setup it has the following advantages:

• The structure of your site is consistent and logical (Don’t you hate it when your supermarket moves your regular items to different aisles?)
• All you need to do is add your articles to the right Section and Category and you’ve finished!
• Search Engines such as Google love single succinct articles with a clear Title and separate URL (address) that fits into a logical structure

So to summarise, the lesson here is to nurture your website structure like a tree.

• Sections are the main large limbs that tend to be constant
• Categories are the thinner branches off each Section that can occasionally be removed or renamed
• Articles are the leaves that belong on the end of the thinner branches and regularly grow (are published) or die and fall off (edited or removed)

It’s the leaves (articles) on reliable consistent branches (Categories and Sections) that are the most important in keeping your tree healthy, vigorous and encourage birds to make their home in