Show All

Hide All

This article was excerpted from Microsoft® Office FrontPage® 2003 Inside Out by Jim Buyens. Visit Microsoft Learning to buy this book. View other articles written by Jim Buyens.

This is the first in a sequence of five articles excerpted from Chapter 13, "Creating Web Sites with Navigation View."

See links to all articles in this sequence

In this article

Introducing Navigation view

Working with Navigation view

Deciding whether to use Navigation view

Introducing Navigation view

After you have created an empty Web site, the next step is, naturally, to fill it with pages. Just as naturally, you should organize and link these pages together in a way that presents your message effectively and that Web site visitors can readily understand.

FrontPage 2003 has a feature called Navigation view that records the content you have in mind and then, together with certain Web components, creates a set of Web pages complete with titles and hyperlinks. What is more, as you revamp and reorganize your content over time, FrontPage updates all the page titles and hyperlinks automatically.

Appealing as Navigation view might be, it is not the best choice for every Web site. As so often occurs, the price of Navigation view's automation is a certain loss of design flexibility and control. Nevertheless, using Navigation view is an excellent approach for creating many kinds of Web sites and one you should consider for sites of medium size and complexity.

 Top of Page

Working with Navigation view

Most Web designers organize their content hierarchically (that is, much like an organization chart). As the following illustration shows, Navigation view provides a way to organize and record this structure.

Using Navigation view has several advantages over other methods of diagramming a Web site's logical structure:

• Navigation view, being electronic, is easier to revise than paper drawings.
• FrontPage automatically creates a Web page for each node that you enter in the Navigation view diagram.
• If you add a Link Bar Based On Navigation Structure component to each page contained in Navigation view, FrontPage creates hyperlinks among your pages that perfectly reflect the Navigation view structure. Furthermore, if you later rearrange all or part of your Navigation view diagram, FrontPage will adjust all of the link bar hyperlinks accordingly.

  To learn more about Link Bar components, see the fourth article in this sequence, Using link bars with Navigation view.

• If you add a Page Banner component to each page you diagram in Navigation view, the text in every page heading and the text in every link bar selection will agree perfectly. This is because both components incorporate the page names that you assign in Navigation view.

  To learn more about page banner components, see the fifth article in this sequence, Using page banners.

• Constructing hyperlinks based on a diagram ensures that your Web site's design concept, its Navigation view, and the actual hyperlinks are always in sync, and that all page titles and link titles are consistent throughout your Web site.

Navigation view and the Link Bar Based On Navigation Structure component work very much hand in hand. After you diagram your page in Navigation view, adding a Link Bar Based On Navigation Structure component to any page creates hyperlinks that correspond to the structure you drew.

All link bars are single FrontPage components that contain multiple links. If you choose not to configure these links yourself and instead tie them to the Navigation view structure, FrontPage will automatically generate and maintain a set of hyperlinks Web visitors can use to traverse your site. In the following illustration, a Link Bar component in the Products page displays hyperlinks to the Web site's home page and the two child pages that appear in the diagram in the preceding illustration.

Documenting the structure of your Web site might at first seem like redundant work; you might expect that FrontPage should infer your site's structure by analyzing hyperlinks or folder structures. On reflection, however, you will find that neither of these methods produces the same results as good human judgment. Here are the reasons:

• Hyperlink analysis fails because most Web pages contain hyperlinks that are convenient for the visitor but extraneous to the Web site's primary content structure.
• Folder analysis fails because most sites become disorganized over time and because utility pages often exist separately from the Web site's main structure.
• If several pages have hyperlinks to the same target page, there is no way to determine which is the target page's true parent in terms of overall structure.

For these reasons, FrontPage takes an opposite approach to eliminating double work: Rather than inducing the Web site's structure from hyperlinks among its pages, FrontPage generates HTML from information you provide about your Web site's structure — information you enter in Navigation view.

 Top of Page

Deciding whether to use Navigation view

Many successful Web designers never use Navigation view, link bars, page banners, or any other FrontPage features that organize, create, and maintain a Web site automatically. Here are some guidelines to aid your decision:

• Rank beginners creating very small sites usually prefer the direct approach (that is, creating and linking a few pages by hand). Working indirectly through Navigation view might be more than they can initially absorb.
• Expert designers usually take the manual approach as well, because it gives them more flexibility over the Web site's design.
• Navigation view can neither organize nor create a site that uses frames.

  Find a link to more information about frames in the See Also section, which is visible when you are connected to the Internet.

• Navigation view is probably overkill for a Web site that has five or fewer pages.
• Navigation view is likely to be unwieldy for a Web site that has more than 100 to 200 Web pages. To use Navigation view for a larger site, break the site into multiple subwebs, each having its own Navigation view diagram.
• Link bar buttons are typically rather large, especially if you format them with a graphical theme. This makes it difficult to design pages that have more than six or eight hyperlinks to child pages. If this many links seem sufficient for any page you can think of, count the number of links on the home page of any large e-commerce or Internet portal site.

 Top of Page

Next article in this sequence

Part 2: Navigation view basics

About the author   Jim Buyens is a FrontPage, Web programming, and networking expert who has written several books, including Microsoft® FrontPage® Version 2002 Inside Out, Web Database Development Step by Step .NET Edition, Faster Smarter Beginning Programming, and Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services Inside Out, all from Microsoft Press. Jim is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) who contributes extensively to the Microsoft FrontPage online communities. He currently develops Web-based business systems for the telecommunications industry.