Navigation Element Best Practices

Overview

There are many ways to use the Navigation Application within your CommonSpot site. It depends a bit on the structure and the design of your site but using the example below you can understand some of the ways you can use the Navigation Application.

Site Example

For our site example we will a modified version of the PaperThin website. The site map included below has been modified from the original website to demonstrate the possibilities which you may encounter with your website.

Download PDF: File:Navigation element site map.pdf

Site Map Explained

In the example above you can see that we have the Home and three other (Privacy Policy, Search and Site Map) pages at the root (/) of the site. The site has 5 main subsites (Solutions, Products, Customers, Services and Company). Under the 5 main subsites are some pages and some additional subsites (ADF and Case Studies).

In the site map diagram you will notice 2 distinctions - Promoted Parent (signified by the red circles) and Start Point (signified by the gray circles. You will notice by the diagram that all Promoted Parents are also Start Points however (as noted by the ADF subsite) all Start Points are not Promoted Parents.

As discussed in the Using_the_Navigation_Application documentation, creating a Promoted Parent allows the navigation to be reset where as the Start Point simply allows a new set of children to be connected.

Building Order Matters

The order in which you build your navigation is important. Depending on what your build your navigation in (e.g. where you start) it can look differently. One the recommendations that we make is to build main subsites prior to building the root. What does that mean?

Build Order 1

1. Navigate to the home page (/index.cfm) and add to navigation (check Promote to Parent)
2. Navigate to pages in root subsite (Site Map, Search and Privacy policy and add to navigation
3. Navigate to the Solutions home page (/solutions/index.cfm) and add to navigation (check Promote to Parent)
4. Navigate to pages within the Solutions subsite (Marketers, IT & Web Developers etc...) and add to navigation

[continue building out other subsites in this same fashion]

When you navigate to a page in the root of the site (e.g. Site Map) you will see the following links:

• [Home] Note: this will be a header
• [Search]
• [Site Map] Note: this will be highlighted
• [Solutions]
• [Products]
• [Privacy Policy]
• [Services]
• [Company]
• [Customers]

Notice how the links in the left navigation show the top level subsites along with the pages in the root (/) of the site? In most cases, this is not desirable since it essentially mimics the top navigation.

Build Order 2

1. Navigate to the Solutions Home page (/solutions/index.cfm) and add to navigation (check Promote to Parent)
2. Navigate to all of the pages within the Solutions subsite (Marketers, IT & Web Developers etc...) and add to navigation
3. Navigate to the Products Home page (/products/index.cfm) and add to navigation (check Promote to Parent)
4. Navigate to all of the pages within the Products subsite and add to navigation

[continue building out other subsites in this same fashion]

After you have completed all of the major subsites you can then build the navigation for the root of your site (if necessary).

When you navigate to a page in the root of the site (e.g. Site Map) you will see the following links:

• [Home] Note: this will be a header
• [Search]
• [Site Map] Note: this will be highlighted
• [Privacy Policy]

Note: See how the navigation example now creates different links. When you create navigation for a subsite it automatically records a record in its parent (and its parents parent etc...). Since the root (/) navigation record did not exist - it was not created.