Chapter 14. Using Navigational Controls and Components

IN THIS CHAPTER

Designing navigation for non-SharePoint Sites

Understanding SharePoint navigation elements

Working with navigation controls

While designing your Web site, it's very important to consider how users might move from one part of the Web site to another with the least amount of confusion. Web sites tend to grow exponentially, which makes it even more essential to ensure that the content exposed is well-structured so that users don't waste a lot of time looking in the wrong places for the information they need. Although one of the major components that helps reduce this ambiguity is Web Site Search, having an intelligently developed navigation structure can save visitors to your Web site a lot of frustration and time loss while browsing for specific content.

SharePoint Designer has a number of tools and components that can be used to quickly develop a strong navigation structure for a Web site. While it inherits many of the navigation components from FrontPage 2003, SharePoint Designer also allows Web site developers to use the ASP.NET navigation controls to develop navigation components. For SharePoint sites, SharePoint Designer offers the capability to use the SharePoint navigational elements, controls, and Web parts to design and interconnect Web pages.

This chapter discusses the components that you can use in SharePoint Designer to develop navigation structures for Web sites. I begin by talking about non-SharePoint FrontPage author time components, such as link bars and bars based on navigation structure. I take you through the steps to create navigation structures by using the SharePoint Designer navigation panes and then create navigation bars based on these structures. Later in this chapter, I talk about how you can use ASP.NET navigation components and controls to design Web site navigation by using SharePoint Designer.

Finally, I discuss how you can use the capabilities offered in SharePoint sites to create navigation controls. I take you through the built-in features that SharePoint has for navigation, and I discuss the SharePoint launch bar and navigation settings. Then, I show you how you can use SharePoint Designer to exploit SharePoint link bars, navigation, and breadcrumb controls to implement a customized Web site navigation framework.