If you are a website designer, there's diminutive doubt that you've heard about Joomla templates. But do you precisely know what's exactly a Joomla template?
A Joomla template is precisely a series of files within the Joomla content supervision theory (Cms) that operate the presentation of the content. So, for all those uninitiated, a Joomla template is not a website in itself nor it represents a unblemished website design. It's naturally a template, i.e., a basic foundation invent that'll help you preview your Joomla website. In order to furnish the follow of a 'complete website', the Joomla template works in tandem with the content stored in the Joomla databases.
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What are the contents of Joomla template? Basically, any Joomla template contains invent information, like stylesheets, images, JavaScript, etc. naturally put, Joomla template is a theme or a skin of your Joomla system. However, there can be only one Joomla template per page.
What's the purpose of a Joomla template? What effectively Joomla template does is to command Joomla where to place Components and Modules, and how to display the Modules. You must be well versed with Joomla Modules, as these can be displayed in plenty of variations and each dissimilarity is separate in its Html yield structure, including the most popular dissimilarity yield - the Xhtml output.
Users of Joomla 1.5 will be well aware of the conception of Joomla Chrome in that version. It is the process where Joomla templates were allowed to skin any component using new Joomla Mvc structure. You can found pieces of Joomla Chrome in Html directory of Joomla template. Undoubtedly, this is one of the most robust additions to the capabilities of Joomla templates.
Why is it called a 'template'? This is because generally, you'll need only one Html/Css layout for your whole website. And this 'template' becomes a model for every page on your website. The visitors may be accessing all the pages or just one page of your website, but the same template will be used to invent each of these pages. Joomla has adequate in-built intelligence to join separate content from its database into the same template to give a unique appearance to every web page as it'd be presented to the visitors.
The Usp of Joomla template is in its architecture, where the invent is a isolate entity and the content is also a isolate entity. While the invent is contained in a small group of files, the content is contained in a database. This is a drastic revision over the custom of creating a bunch of static pages, and each page having separate invent elements that are repeated for every page. The advantages of this advent include:
1. Flexibility and ease of changing invent of your website within a few seconds. All you need to do is naturally upload a new template or make necessary changes to the existing one. All the changes will be reflected on all the web pages. For instance, if you want to growth the font-size of a text, all you need to do is edit the Css and growth the size accordingly, it'd be reflected across all the pages of your website.
2. It makes the backing-up of the content of the site easier. All you need is to download a single database file and you are done for your whole site! There are also some Joomla extensions ready that can email a daily database backup automatically.
3. Depending on the variables, content can be accordingly presented. For instance, registered users can be allowed to view supplementary content than the unregistered ones. Thus, restrictions against non-members can be precisely settled with Joomla templates.
W3C and Table-less Design
There are, basically, three necessary attributes of a good potential webpage. These are usability, accessibility, and Seo-ability [http://www.prateeksha.com/joomla-seo.html]. In fact, if you take a holistic advent towards web designing, then all these qualities tend to overlap in the sense that is a webpage is usable, it tends to be both accessible and Seo-able. In other words, all you need to do is target one potential and the others will fall in line. Perhaps, the simplest mode of achieving these desirable features in a webpage is to use the framework laid out in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web standards.
Take, for example, a site that is structured semantically with Xhtml. It'll be precisely read with the use of a screen reader by the one who has poor eyesight. Moreover, it can also be precisely read by a crusade machine spider. The working of Google is similar to that of a screen reader in that it does not know how to read your website but it achieves the task.
Basically, Web standards are nothing but a set of rules put in place for use by the web browsers in order to display a webpage. W3C is the society that is behind the publication of these standards. It is the same organization, whose Director, Tim Berners-Lee, is credited with the inventing the World Wide Web in 1989.
Interestingly, if you ask, say, 10 designers about web standards, you'll most likely get 10 separate replies. But one tasteless thing that emerges out of their replies is that these are based on using valid code in any language you use - Html or Xhtml.
Semantically spoton Code
A semantic webpage naturally means that Xhtml in the webpage describes only content and not presentation. In other words, it means employing a structured society of H1, H2, H3,... Tags and using just tables for tabular data. A semantically spoton code does not use layout for tabular data.
Cascading Style Sheets (Css)
Css is similar to having semantic code to operate the look and layout of a webpage. In effect, Css is a simpler mode of adding style (like fonts, colors, spacing, etc.) to the webpages. Css exists parallel to Xhtml code and thus, it helps you to isolate content from presentation, i.e., semantic code from Css. A good example of insight this conception is Css Zen Garden, a website where the same semantic Xhtml is shaped in separate and unique ways with separate Css. The net follow achieved is the webpages that look very separate but have the same core content.
However, you can still take ample steps to ensure that template is accessible (like scalable font-sizes), usable (like clear navigation), and optimized for crusade engines (like source ordered).
Prateeksha Web invent has all the skills, expertise and contact to make sure that your Joomla Template website ranks among the top 10 of every major crusade machine results. And with our pro help, your Joomla Template website can also feature among top results in Google.
What's Exactly a Joomla Template?