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site design main
1. the web project
2. what is info arch
3. organizing info
4. navigation systems
a. site navigation
b. browser navigation
* c. global vs local
d. integral navigation
e. remote navigation
5. labeling systems
6. search systems
7. project planning
8. project development


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Global vs. Local

These tutorials are about Information Architecture in Web Design.

Global vs. Local Navigation

Within the Web site, navigation can be broken down into various categories. One way of differentiating navigation elements is whether they are global or local navigation elements.

Global navigation elements are elements for navigating major sections of the site. They are the main menu that takes you to primary navigation pages, as well as the links that should appear on every page. For instance, every page should have a home link and an e-mail link.

Local navigation systems are elements for navigating locally within some subset of pages in a site, useally called a sub-site. A sub-site is a coherent collection of pages that have related content and can stand alone as a grouping. For instance, each of my courses can be considered to be a sub-site within the main site.

These are not absolute categories. For instance, a weekly assignment page might have global navigation elements, local navigation elements for the course as a whole (which are in effect global within the course itself), and local navigation elements to that week's assignments. Take a look as the assignments page for the courses on this site for an example.

These pages in general have a global navigation bar on the top of each page to move you between sections of the site and a local menu down the side to go to pages within the site. But notice that the local navigation menu is the one that has the global links that are neither sections of a site nor documents within any site section, like my e-mail link and a link to the campus main page. This is because they make more sense there. Just try to think about putting them in the menu bar across the top of the page and you will probably see what I mean. Organization doesn't always mean adhering to regidly defined terms.

An important element of global navigation systems is that they should set the standard for how all linking within the site works. So they are not only a primary navigation element, but also a model for the designing of other navigation elements. They should define the structure of the navigation system.

Note that within this site I have a global navigation men uthat takes you to sections of the site, each of which works the same way when you get there. I have built a hierarchy of navigation structures, making the site comparatively easy to use.

Another type of navigation element that is purely supplemental, is ad-hoc elements. Ad-hoc elements, also called see-also links, are supplemental links added to the navigation structure to provide additional information about relationships between content. Ad-hoc links should be reserved for use as editorial links, links that are not part of the navigation structure, but are included because the author thought they were important.

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These pages can be found at: [http://academ.hvcc.edu/~kantopet/]
Copyright 2003 -- Peter L. Kantor[]
Last Updated March 2003