ASP.NET 2.0 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Site Navigation

In This Chapter

✓	Making Web pages easy to navigate with TreeViews, Menus, and breadcrumbs
✓	Coding your own navigation controls
✓	Knowing where you are with a SiteMap file
✓	Sprucing up navigation controls with custom styles

Disorientation is a very uncomfortable sensation. People need to know where they are, how they got there, and how to get back to where they previously were. This applies not only to physical environments, but also to the virtual space on the Internet. The bigger the Web site, the harder it is to navigate. You can recognize a poorly designed site as you explore it: The only way to get back to a recognizable place is to retype the starting URL.

Navigation tools help visitors build a mental model of the site and categorize huge numbers of pages. The TreeView control, with its expandable nodes, helps users deal with hundreds of links in manageable chunks and logical paths. The Menu control guides browsers by generating a horizontal or vertical interface that reveals categories and hierarchies as you pass the mouse pointer over an item. Breadcrumbs, implemented through the ASP.NET SiteMapPath control and its corresponding Web.sitemap file, show the user the pathway back up through the site’s hierarchy, often with links to each page’s parent page.

In this chapter, you learn how to add and configure navigation controls for use on your ASP.NET pages.

Understanding Site Navigation

For a small Web site, you can get away with a list of hyperlinks to content. ...