Front and Center: Navigation Power and Building a Site in Navigation View First

The navigation elements built in to FrontPage 2003 are quite possibly the most underutilized feature of the product. They make the development process considerably easier because you can, in short, produce navigation with the simple drag and drop of the mouse. Personally, I have saved countless hours letting FrontPage write navigation bars for me.

The continually popular FrontPage Template industry also makes great use of these features. The fact that the top selling templates make use of FrontPage's navigational features shows how powerful and attractive these features are for FrontPage users.

As was hinted at in this chapter, there are a few potential problems that anyone who is developing a site in FrontPage and wants to use these features needs to take into consideration. In short, once you've committed to using this feature, there is pretty much no way to go back without considerable time and effort to redo all that has been done. Make sure that you understand these issues. I've received too many emails from folks whose sites have gone out of control, so I can't emphasize this fact enough.

Obviously, this is an issue of site size. A more traditional "brochure ware" site of eight or so pages should certainly make use of these features. I would say that concern for anything mentioned in this chapter should only be voiced after a site exceeds 50 or so pages.

The other option of building site navigational elements from an included file cannot be overemphasized either. Although it doesn't give you the element of dynamically generated menu bars that you get from FrontPage, it can speed up the design process considerably because editing a single file can update all necessary pages. Consider this option as well.

It is also important to note that the custom link bar is not based on site navigational properties and can be used on any project to produce link bars at the click of a mouse. Some users will find that they'll ignore every element of FrontPage's navigational system and bars based on them, but will embrace this very cool and very functional feature.

One of the things I like most about Navigation view is how it forces you to look at your site in terms of hierarchy and position how one page not only connects, but relates with another. I would bet money that a number of people would never be able to produce such a map of their "simple" sites. These are the same people who complain that people can't figure their way around their sites.

If you have the luxury of building a site from scratch, consider building the site first entirely in Navigation view, having FrontPage force you to think of your site the way you should. Once you have created a navigational view of your site, you will be many steps ahead of anyone who hasn't.

You will be very surprised at what happens when you "build" a site this way. Suddenly, the importance of certain pages will come into question, whereas pages buried deep inside your site will suddenly find a new position because no one realized how buried the content was.

Must you use the link bars that come with FrontPage if you decide to take my recommendation? Of course not. The other thing I love so much about FrontPage is how it lets you take the parts you want and lets you do what you want with them. Just make sure that you are taking advantage of the best that FrontPage offers to you.