Operation Manual

Developing Sites and Pages | 33
Navigation
In WebPlus, certain types of theme graphic we’ll call "navigation
elements"—such as Previous/Next buttons and Navigation bars (or "navbars"
for short) are pre-programmed to understand your site structure, making it
easy to design a site that’s simple to navigate. You simply select one from the
Studio’s Theme Graphics tab and WebPlus does the rest! Previous/Next
buttons automatically link laterally, to adjacent pages on the same level.
Navbars combine buttons with popup menus to facilitate movement between
the various sections and levels of a site.
For example, here’s a navbar we selected for the site shown in the tree on the
previous page. The buttons provide links to the Home and section menu pages
(all at Level 1) and popup menus that link to child pages (Level 2 in this case).
Here’s a brief summary of the advantages of incorporating navigation
elements in your site design:
• You can install navigation elements at any level of your site, and (for
navbars) easily customize which part(s) of the site structure each navbar
should link to—for example, to top-level pages, pages on the same level,
child pages, etc.
• Because navigation elements are theme graphics, you can use the Theme
Graphics tab to select co-ordinated design elements (buttons, etc.) for a
consistent look, and change the overall appearance with a single click.
• By default, all pages in the tree are "included in navigation"—that is, they
can be linked to by navigation elements. You can exclude certain pages
so they’ll be ignored by navigation elements. Included pages show a
mark in their page entry, while an excluded page lacks the mark. For
example, suppose you had a section of reference pages that you didn’t
want visitors to explore top-down. Excluding the parent page for that
section would remove it from the navbar. Of course, you can still create
hyperlinks to the page—it just won’t appear in navigation elements.