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Joomla gives you two options for how to organize all your content articles. Remember that each article is a discrete piece of content; for example, it might be a two-paragraph news announcement about your company. While a small site might only have five to ten articles, a big site could have thousands. The size and complexity of your site are a huge consideration for how to organize your articles.

Let's take a conceptual look at these two organizational options, and then we will see how they apply to our imaginary Joomla website for Widget Inc.

Uncategorized articles are by far the simplest way to organize a Joomla website. As the name implies, there is basically no hierarchical structure.

Let's consider an analogy to help us understand. Imagine we are trying to organize a stack of papers on a desk. Each piece of paper represents a single content article, and our website is represented by a filing cabinet next to the desk.

If we were to organize our articles as uncategorized, we would simply place them in a drawer of the filing cabinet. If there aren't many articles, this is a fast and easy way to organize them. I can easily find what I want by just picking up the small stack of papers and flipping through the sheets (that is, following links to the different articles).

If I have many more articles than a dozen, using uncategorized articles isn't going to work. If I pick up the stack, I might have to flip through a thousand pieces of paper.

As with almost all Content Management Systems, Joomla provides a hierarchy to organize large amounts of content articles. Joomla offers two levels: the highest is called sections, and below that are categories. In the most general case you will have the kind of structure (sections and categories) shown here.