Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 Bible

14.1. Designing Navigation for Non-SharePoint Sites

For non-SharePoint sites, the navigation structure has to be built from scratch, unlike SharePoint sites where you already might have a number of controls to work with. Here again, based on whether you're working with a Web site that allows hidden metadata, you can use SharePoint Designer tools in a number of ways to create your Web site's navigation.

NOTE

For more on hidden metadata, see Chapter 1.

14.1.1. Using the Navigation pane

The SharePoint Designer Navigation pane is the key interface that you use to design a Web site's structure in a very simple manner. After the structure is ready, you can have a number of components available in SharePoint Designer make use of the structure you created in the Navigation pane to display navigation links on Web pages.

NOTE

The Navigation pane can only be used with Web sites that have hidden metadata allowed for use. The structure of the Web site you create in the Navigation pane is stored in the structure.cnf file in the hidden _vti_pvt folder of the Web site.

When working with the Navigation pane, you have two options:

• Add existing Web pages to the Navigation pane to form a structure.

• Use the Navigation pane to form a structure with new Web pages and then later design those pages.

Whichever way you choose, creating the navigation structure is half the part of implementing your Web site navigation. The other half is to insert navigation controls on Web pages that use the structure ...