Microsoft .NET Server Solutions for the Enterprise

Web Site Support for Non-Catalog Navigation

Much of the infrastructure for presenting these different types of navigation to the shopper must be provided in the code associated with the retail Web site itself. A well-coded Web site isolates the code associated with different aspects of this navigation into routines that can be called to render the presentation of that navigation mechanism on each page in which it occurs.

For example, there should be a routine that creates the HTML that renders a standardized horizontal navigation bar. This HTML may be an HTML table containing a single row, with a number of columns that match the number of links being displayed. It might be designed such that a parameter can be passed that indicates the particular page from which the routine is being called, so that the link to that page can be rendered as text without an associated hot link but with some other type of emphasis to indicate that the shopper is already on that page.