Operation Manual

66 Working with Hyperlinks and Interactivity
The navigation bar is tremendously useful, but the structure of your site
may call for other kinds of navigational links. For example, suppose
several pages comprise a natural sequence. Perhaps a long story or
report has been broken into several sections, or directory listings are
arranged alphabetically. In such situations, create a browse sequence
using a mini-navigation bar that lets the user step forward or backward
through the series. One way is to provide Previous and Next buttons,
using fairly standard arrow graphics:
The problem with Previous/Next buttons is that you’ll have to custom-
link each button to a specific target page, with a different pair of links
on every page in the series. A more economical (and functional)
browse sequence bar looks like this...
...where the five dots represent a five-page sequence. The square center
shows the current page. To get to any one of the five pages, the user
simply clicks the corresponding dot. If you use a set of five hotspots
“hard-wired” to the correct pages, you can duplicate the hotspot set on
all five pages, and simply place a different graphic on each page.
Finally, while we don’t encourage long pages that force the user to
scroll on and on, it’s handy to know that a hyperlink to the current page
will force the browser to redisplay the top of the page. So in situations
that seem to call for it, you can include a TOP button (typically with a
small up-arrow) at the bottom of your page, linked to the current page.
After all, the user worked hard to get to the bottom—why make them
climb all the way back up?