Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Showing the Way with Navigational Tools

The more complex your Web site is, the more important it is to use good navigational tools. Although a search engine provides quick answers to specific questions, there’s nothing like browsing your way through a site to really get to know what treasures are tucked away. You can help your visitors find their way around your site with some of these handy navigational helpers.

Creating menus with VMaxNav

VMaxNav, a Java applet from Virtual Max, creates an Explorer-style menu that makes site navigation a breeze. As you can see in Figure 6-12, it’s attractive, space saving, and useful. It’s also easy for Webmasters to work with. You can control the colors and fonts that it uses and even throw in a background image if you want. You can download VMaxNav from www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/8620/vmaxnav.zip.

Figure 6-12. VMaxNav creates an attractive site map menu.

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The basic code for adding the VMaxNav applet is as follows:

<APPLET code="vmaxnav.class" width="200" height="294">    

You can alter the width and height attributes, but if you’re using a background image, make sure that you use one that either fits the new dimensions or looks good as it tiles. Otherwise, your nice, new navigational tool won’t look too good. ...