Using Joomla's built-in tools to power your website content

Using Joomla's built-in tools will save you a lot of time and money. They can be used to improve your search engine rankings, create landing pages for your site, give you more flexibility in using content etc.

Add More Pages to Your Website Using Joomla's Category Manager

You already know that Joomla has a Toolbar. The Category Manager is also located on the Toolbar, and allows you to add extra pages to your website.

Many people forget this feature exists because it does not appear in the drop-down menu when you use the View Tab and select Page. That's why we're going to remind you now so that you can take advantage of it in the future.

You'll find the Category Manager by clicking on "Categories" under Joomla's main Toolbar. If Category Manager is not visible, hover your mouse over the Menu link and select Category Manager from the drop down menu.

The next step is to add a page to your site by choosing the drop-down menu next to "Add New Category".

This menu is called the Category Manager Menu and will appear every time you click on the top link for a specific extension. The Joomla's built-in categories are listed first, followed by any categories from extensions that may have been added in the past.

You should end up with a category list like the one shown below. As you can see, your site now has two extra pages under "Services."

Note: Category Manager is also used when working with SEF URLs. If you've added any custom extensions which use the Joomla's built-in SEF URL support, then you can create pages for your site's new custom extensions from the Category Manager menu.

For example, you may have added a Custom Article Type to Joomla which contains articles that each focus on a specific product or service. If this is the case, then those articles will also be listed in the Category Manager drop-down menu. In turn, you can create a page for each of these individual articles.

Using the Quick Edit Feature of Joomla's Category Manager

You may have noticed that before you added any pages in the Category Manager, those categories said "Categories" at the end. That's because they were Categories as opposed to Pages.

You can turn these Categories into Pages by using Joomla's Quick Edit feature. This is very easy and takes less than five seconds. All you have to do is click the Quick Edit button...

... click the blue "Save" button at the bottom of the page and then click on "Quick Edit" again. Voila! No longer a Category, now it's a Page:

Note: you can also use Joomla's Quick Edit to make any Page into a Category, however this is not recommended since it may cause your site's internal linking to break. To learn more about Joomla's Quick Edit feature, click here .

Creating a Landing Page for Your Website Using Category Manager

It is highly recommended that you set up a landing page for your website that contains links to all the subpages of your site. You can do so by creating a Page that uses only Internal Links. This allows you to create one page that contains information about your site as opposed to having multiple pages with more or less the same information scattered throughout them. Having just one landing page will make it easier for visitors to find exactly what they're looking for on your website and increase the overall experience they have when visiting your site.

Creating a Page with Internal Links is very easy to do using Joomla's Category Manager and the following steps will walk you through the process.

First, create your new page as you normally would by using a template of your choice and entering in any content that you want displayed on this page. In our example, we'll call it "Home".

Next, go to Category Manager and click on the drop-down menu next to "Add New Category".

In this example we'll just use one of our new categories that was created automatically when Joomla was installed: Uncategorised.

Now we're going to add a couple of Internal Links in order to test a few things. Click on Internal Links and then the "Add New Link" button:

Here, you'll want to click "New Page" (see red arrow above). The Joomla editor will open up. Choose your new page as well as any Category that you would like it to be linked to. This can be one of the Category Manager categories that you created or one of any other pages on your site. In our example, we'll choose our new "Home" page and the Uncategorised category:

Note: in this step, it is important to choose " None (Home)" as shown above since if an article is linked directly to a specific page such as "Contact" as opposed to being linked to a category such as "Services," then the Joomla search engine will not be able to find it and neither will visitors since they won't be aware that it exists.

In this step, you'll want to choose a different Category name than what is already on the right hand side of the Category Manager. For example, instead of choosing Uncategorised in the previous step, you may choose to name it "Home". In this way, you can set up subcategories within Categories for added organization.

Note: If you have a specific Category named "Services", then obviously choose that Category here as opposed to using another generic category like "Home."

Adding Internal Links Using the Joomla Toolbar

The quickest way to add Internal Links in Joomla is by using the Joomla toolbar. Here's how it works:

Note: you will need to have at least two pages created on your site for this process to work. If you're reading this after having already created several pages, then you can just select the first two that appear in the Joomla editor.

First, go to Extensions > Toolbar Manager and click on "New" (red arrow). Then enter a name for your toolbar such as "Home". Click on "Submit" (green arrow above) and then click on "Configure" (blue arrow above). In this step, you want to add the Internal Links by choosing "Internal Link Home," clicking on "Add" and then selecting your "Home" page from within the Joomla editor:

Now you're done! Remember that having a Main Menu Item pointing to your Landing Page is very important. You should also create a new Menu Item for every page on your site.

The Joomla Category Manager is the easiest way to add Internal Links to your Joomla website.