I'm building a site for a friend and I should state that this is not what I'm doing for living. I just started working with Joomla a few days ago.
Everything is good so far, except I'm stuck at one point.
This is a site for a construction company and I need to create articles for on-going and completed projects. I will create an article for each project and each article will belong to a category, 'Completed' and 'On-Going', respectfully.
I plan to create menu links for 'Completed' and 'On-Going' categories in main menu. I also want to present a thumbnail of the article on the category list. Problem is, standard look of the category list is kinda ugly, and I have no idea how to change it. I'm using a template named PixelDot, but it does not seem to do any good for my problem.
During my research, I stumbled upon concepts 'Layout Overrides' and 'Alternative Layouts'. I have basic html and css knowledge, also some PHP, but I am totally lost on which file(s) to modify. I also need a little help on get the entry text picture as a thumbnail on the category list (this is the list where you see 'articles' aka projects which belongs to the category (completed or on-going), when you clicked on relevant menu button)
Any help will be highly appreciated. My Joomla version is 3.4.1. (which I believe most up-to-date version as today)
I'm sometimes making it more complex while I try to make things detailed and clear, I hope this is not one of those cases.