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Navigation is probably the most important part of your site because poor navigation prevents your site visitors from finding the information they need. SiteCM web content management accommodates many different navigation structures and menu systems and you can add pages to any menu with a few clicks. Your best choice depends on the structure of the material that you want to present on the site. Before beginning the design it is worthwhile to plan what will be on your site and how broad and deep the site will be. Menus can be thought of as a tree system with many branches. A simple sketch can help you determine how your content will be organized and can help the designer make the best choices for you today and as your site grows.
SiteCM generates the menu items based on the structure you created in the content manager. The appearance, positioning, colours, highlight or roll over effects, are all determined by your designer and programmed in CSS.
As shown in the Layout section, your top level navigation, the links that are always visible, can be presented either horizontally or vertically.
Flyout menus appear when you move your mouse over or click on the anchor item in your top level navigation. The menus vanish when you move away from the anchor or click on another item. Each flyout menu can have additional flyouts but more than two levels of flyouts can be hard to use limiting your site to 3 levels of navigation.
Flyouts save screen space on your site. The drawback of Flyouts is that when the menus disappear, so does the information they contain. Menus contain information about your company or product features that you want the user to see and hopefully visit. If they do not open the menu again, they will not see the items and might not visit the pages. Without the menu being persistant, or always visible, the user can also get lost, especially if you have multiple levels of flyouts. (See the advanced design page for information about Breadcrumb Navigation).
Accordion navigation appears when you click the Anchor item, and it stays visible while the site visitor is in that section. Accordian Menus solves the vanishing content issue of the Flyouts. A site can use multiple levels of Accordion however in practice, it is difficult to design too many nested levels of accordion navigation. Too many open items can create a very long menu quite quickly. Accordion can be combined with Flyouts for sites with deeper structures giving you up to 4 levels of navigation.
Horizontal navigation is popular because none of the width on the page is lost to a margin below your navigation. Flyout menus, drop down from the top level items and can expand to the right to give you 3 or 4 levels of structure.
Preplanning is essential with Horizontal Navigation. This method is recommended for more advanced SiteCM users because there is a limit to the width of any page. Too many top level items can cause your site to have horizontal scroll bars or can cause wrapping of some navigation items as they try to fit in a specified maximum width. Your designer will have to accommodate and test many eventualities.
This method combines horizontal and vertical navigation. The Horizontal navigation can have drop down flyout menus as shown above. When the user enters the second level, the sub-navigation can appear in the site margin. The vertical navigation can include Accordion and Flyouts allowing up to 6 levels of structure depending on your implementation.
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