Navigational Tools
This tutorial will explain some of the many possibilities you may use when creating navigational tools for your web site. To begin, let me explain why you need navigational tools.
When someone visits your web site, you never know the manner in which they entered. They may have started at the "Main" page, and clicked on a link to a particular page. It is just as probable that they arrived directly at a particular page as the result of a search engine (like Google) link. Visitors will only be able to move around your site if you provide some sort of navigational tool.
A navigational tool is a list of links to different areas of a web site. For EDUC 565, the main links are simple... Assignment 5, Assignment 6, etc. For a school, the top level links may be something like Academics, Calendars & Events, Athletics, and Students & Teachers.
A navigational tool can be a list of words that act as normal hypertext links.
| Home | Academics | Calendars/Events | Athletics | Students/Teachers |
These same links can be placed inside a table, and formatted to look like the following:
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If you create a graphic, you can do the same thing with an image.
Having a navigational tool on every page of your site lets a visitor move around no matter how he/she arrived at the site.
Before you begin creating these navigational tools, it is important to understand the difference between a relative and absolute link.