Operation Manual

Working with Hyperlinks and Interactivity 85
Navigation elements
If you’ve used the WebPlus Site Structure tree to develop a logical
arrangement of sections and levels for your site, there’s no reason not
to install a navigation bar (introduced back in Chapter 3). In addition
to this valuable basic component, 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 parts, or directory listings are arranged
alphabetically. In such situations, you can create a browse sequence
using a mini-navigation bar that lets the user step forward or backward
through the series. Previous and Next buttons can accomplish this
nicely, by linking between adjacent “sibling” pages on the same level.
The Studio’s Themes tab provides a ready-made assortment of these
and other navigation elements as theme graphics. Chapter 3 outlined
the advantages of using theme graphics for navigation: they
automatically adapt to changes in your site structure, they’re easy to
customize, you can instantly switch to a different design set, and so on.
As with anything that’s “free,” however, theme-based navigation
elements come with a few limitations. Fortunately, with a little extra
effort (still far less than if you had to construct everything from
scratch!) you can address these minor shortcomings and achieve
superior results.
Ideally, a navigation bar should do more than look pretty and enable
users to get around the site. It should also provide locational feedback
within the site, so users know where they are. For example, when the
user jumps to the “About Us” section of the site, the “About Us” button
should highlight or change color—something to indicate the current
location. Theme graphic navbars don’t (as yet) provide this kind of
visual feedback—their buttons are programmed to respond to mouse
events, but other attributes such as color are fixed.
If you were to develop a navigation bar from scratch, you could prepare
a unique set of buttons for each section of the site, using a different
color or font style for the button representing the “current” section. Or
you could place a basic navbar on the master page layer and overlay the
current section’s button with a single, different button on each page.
The extra effort would be worth it, considering you’d undertaken to
build the navbar in the first place. But with theme graphic navbars
available, there’s simply no sane reason to build one by hand.
Instead, consider this “best of both worlds” approach...