Plan site navigation (Windows SharePoint Services)

Applies To: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Topic Last Modified: 2016-05-06

In this article:

• Create a site navigation diagram

• Understanding shared navigation

• Determine which sites share the top link bar

• Determine which additional links to add manually to the top link bar

• Worksheets

Use this article to design the navigation for your site.

Create a site navigation diagram

Make a diagram of the sites you want to create. For example, the following diagram is for a small travel company named Margie's Travel. The company has a set of internal sites to help them organize their core business, which is planning conventions.

Your diagram might include a single site collection, such as the example for Margie's Travel, or it might have multiple site collections if you have a more complex set of sites. Be sure to include all top-level Web sites, subsites, Meeting Workspace or Document Workspace sites, and other sites that you plan to create and leave room for future expansion.

You might also want to include the lists and libraries for each site, especially if you are deciding whether to create a subsite for document storage or one or more document libraries. For more information about planning lists and document libraries, see Plan for content and search (Windows SharePoint Services).

Understanding shared navigation

The top link bar appears at the top of all pages in the site, below the site title. You can share the top link bar between sites in a site collection, or have a unique top link bar for each site.

The top link bar can display two levels of sites in a site collection. For example, the top link bar for the Margie's Travel site collection might contain links for Margie's Travel Home, Office Management, Convention Planning, and Sales and Marketing. In this example, the top link bar looks like the following:

Home | Office Management | Convention Planning | Sales and Marketing

However, by default, sites at a third level in the hierarchy do not appear on the top link bar for the top-level Web site, even if they share the navigation. For example, the Tips and Reports sites would not appear on the top link bar of Margie's Travel Home because they are subsites of the Convention Planning site. If you want these sites to appear, you can manually add them to the top link bar, or create them at the second level in the site hierarchy (as subsites under Margie's Travel Home, rather than as subsites under the Convention Planning site).

The top link bar cannot be shared between sites in different site collections. However, you can always manually add a link to a site in a different site collection.

Determine which sites share the top link bar

If you want the Home tab of a subsite to take you to the subsite's home page instead of the shared navigation's home page, then you should use unique navigation. Otherwise, you should use shared navigation. For example, the Margie's Travel site collection could share the top links among all of the second-level sites, so that all sites have the same navigation:

Home | Office Management | Convention Planning | Sales and Marketing

This works for a small team, such as in Margie's Travel, where all of the users in the organization work with all of the sites. Each user in the site collection uses each of the sites, so a shared top link bar is useful. However, if the Convention Planning and Sales and Marketing teams work fairly independently and do not need access to each other's sites, then the navigation for Margie's Travel could be customized to be shared at the second level, rather than the top level, as in the following:

Margie's Travel Home site: Home | Office Management

Convention Planning site: Convention Planning | Tips | Blogs

Sales and Marketing site: Sales and Marketing

Keep in mind that the new global breadcrumb navigation always contains a link back to the top-level site in the site collection. Therefore, even though users of the Convention Planning site cannot go to Margie's Travel Home from the top link bar, they can go directly to it from the global breadcrumb navigation.

Determine which additional links to add manually to the top link bar

Whether or not you decide to share the top link bar, you can customize the top link bar to include links to any other URL that you need. Depending on the extent of customization you need, you can choose between the following methods to customize the top link bar:

• If you want to add, remove, or rearrange the links in a top link bar, use the Top Link Bar page in Site Settings for the site.

• If you want to create an entirely custom top link bar, and apply it to all sites in a site collection, or to sites in different site collections, use SharePoint Designer or Microsoft Visual Studio. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services V3: Software Development Kit (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=798133&clcid=0x409).

Worksheets

Use the following worksheets to plan site navigation:

• Site hierarchy choices worksheet (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=73140&clcid=0x409)

• Site hierarchy planning tool (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=73144&clcid=0x409) (a downloadable Microsoft Office Visio file)