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Joomla! Template Selection Considerations |
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When selecting or creating a template for your Joomla! content management system website, we offer these suggestions for consideration: - Build-it, Buy It or Freebies: Before hiring Mellow Ventures or others to build a new template, consider the many thousands of templates available commercially or for free. The free templates may be good for personal websites, but the cost of a commercial template are relatively inexpensive. If you are concerned about keeping your template unique, there are two things to consider. First, two websites using the same base template may look vastly different because of the use of varying modules, colors and layouts. Second, many commercial template designers will for an additional fee sell you the unique rights to a template. If you can't find what you are looking for off the shelf, then consider designing your own template.
- Navigation: What makes or brakes a template is the quality of the navigations. Some templates have a menu system that will not accommodate your needs or is not intuitive to users of the website. Make sure that the navigation options allow for an easy to use and navigate menu system.
- Fixed vs. Dynamic Width - Some templates are designed to be displayed at a fixed width (e.g., 800 or 980 pixels) while others are designed to fill 100% of the screen. The fixed width templates will give you greater control of the page layout and paragraph breaks and are preferred by many. Dynamic width templates allow all of the screen real estate to be utilized and thus minimize the amount of vertical scrolling necessary for longer articles or pages. Some templates offer both options, although you must select one or the other.
- Background Colors - Consider the audience and industry for your website. Certain colors are masculine while others are feminine. Also if you have graphics that do NOT have transparent backgrounds, your images may not look good when placed on a colored background. You may need to spend time editing your images to convert them to transparent backgrounds.
- Editable Style Sheets - Most templates today have one or more cascading style sheets (CSS) that allow you to manage the font, spacing, alignment and other layout features in a centralized location. Templates with a single style sheet are easier to manage. If the base template will require substantial alternations to the CSS, you may not achieve the desired result as spacing and layout for the template most likely made certain assumptions on the accompanying CSS.
- Module Positions - module positions are pre-defined sections or areas of the website where you can place content (e.g., header, logo spot, left, middle, right columns, footer, etc.). Simple templates may have only 5-8 usable module templates, while more complex and sophisticated templates may have 20 or more pre-defined module positions. As long as you can accommodate your desired layout, you are fine, but we have found that more is generally better.
- Other features or special effects - some temlates are designed by publishers that also design Joomla! extensions and have tested compatibility with their templates. Scrolling and fading effects, blogging and special menu systems are examples. If you have the need for a specific extension to Joomla!, consider if the template will support it.
- Joomla! Version - as of the date of this writing, there are two basic Joomla! template categories: Joomla! 1.0 compatible and Joomla! 1.5x compatible. If you are deploying a new website, you will want to make sure that your template is compatible with at least Joomla! 1.5 or the most current core Joomla! release.
- SEO Friendly - some templates will provide better search engine optimization (SEO) or are more search engine friendly (SEF).
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