Before you start with your new Mambo web site, you should spend some time planning your site.

You need to consider the overall "look and feel" of your site. What colours will you use? Do you want to use particular images, and if so, where do you want these to display on your "page"? The overall appearance of your web site is given through the use of templates.

Mambo comes with two default templates. You can choose to use one of these templates, or you may modify one, create your own, or download one of the many free open source templates that are available on the Web.

Now that you have an idea of how you want your site to look, you need to consider the content of your Mambo web site.

Planning your content is important.

Mambo uses a Menu-based navigation structure. You should spend some time planning the overall placement of the content within your site. Think about what menu items you want. Do you want to use just one menu? Where do you want it to be placed on your "page"? What do you want displayed by each menu item? Consider what you want to show as the main content of your site and what needs to be considered as secondary content (such as copyright notices, news updates, banners, etc).

It helps to make a written plan. Time spent planning at the beginning will save you a lot of work later on!

Grab a sheet of paper and make a list of all the information you are going to show on your site. Organise this into topic groupings. If you think in terms of a site map, this will help you work out the structure you want for your data.

Now look at your groupings, and think about how they will fit into the Mambo structure, which uses Sections -> Categories -> Content Items.

What menu items will you use to present this information to your visitors?

Now that you have worked out WHAT you want to do, let's look at HOW you will achieve what you want.

Ok, so now you know WHAT you want in your site and how you want it to be placed.

Final considerations include:

Can all this be achieved with the core Mambo install or do you need to extend Mambo?
Mambo offers downloadable core extensions from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mambo
There are also 3rd party extensions and add-ons available on the Net.  Have a look at http://mambo-extensions.com or ask for recommendations on the Mambo forum.

Once you have your "engine" sorted out, its back to the template to arrange the placement. The template is essentially the HTML (or XHTML) container for your dynamic data. You can place your content anywhere you like within the template.

The best way to familiarise yourself with how Mambo's internal engine places content is by playing with it. Before you make any modifications to the default template, go to Modules -> Site Modules and select a module that is displaying content on your frontpage. Experiment with the parameters and view your frontpage in your browser.

I won't delve into all the options for module placement here as the options are really limited only by your imagination and your templating skills.

There is more information about working with templates and the CSS file in the Design section of the Mambo Manual - the community wiki (http://mambo-manual.org/docs/Design)

So, to summarise, planning is one of the most important tasks when setting up your new Mambo web site. Mambo is very flexible and your site can be presented in almost any way that you may want. Plan what you want to do, then look at how you can do it.