Site Structure - Adding Pages
Initial Site Structure: Home
When you first open TMS-SiteNav (click toolbar button "TMS-SiteNav") on a website, the TMS-SiteNav window opens, with the Site tab visible. Your initial site structure is shown as just your Home page -- regardless of how many other pages you have already created in Expression Web (EW):
Your Home page is the page that, in Expression Web, is shown with a little picture of a house (in the Folder List or Web Site views). [TBD: If author later CHANGES the file name of the Home page, will TMS-SiteNav respond to this? TEST]. By default, the word "Home" will appear on links to this page. You can change this at any time by clicking on the caption "Home" to select it (as shown in image above, with blue selection highlight, and black insertion cursor under it). Then look below for a sub-tab "Link Properties", and text field "Link Caption" containing text "Home" -- edit this to the desired text:
Your First Few Links
As the purple text suggests, the first step is to add some links to your site structure, by browsing through the tree view of the pages in your web site, and clicking on the ones you want.
Using ToolmakerSteve.com as an example, the first link I want is to this user guide. I click on the sitenav folder, then I click in that folder on index.htm:
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By default, the caption for this link is the page title. This page has a very long page title. I want a short text to fit on a button in a link bar, so I edit the text after "Link Caption:" down to "TMS-SiteNav". We see the corresponding change up in the Site Structure area, in the blue-highlighted link:
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(By the way, I could check that I had the page I wanted, by clicking on "Open Page in EW". That button is found at the bottom of the Link Properties sub-tab, underneath the Page URL.)
You may have noticed, to the right of the "Link Properties" sub-tab, another tab labeled "Bar Viewer". It shows a preview of the link bar for whatever page's link-caption is currently selected. Here is the view after two more links have been added:
These rectangular buttons in shades of blue are the default style used by TMS-SiteNav; to select different styles, see Styling later in this User Guide.
Because I have added several pages, TMS-SiteNav removes that first purple hint text mentioned above; now I see three new hints about how to proceed:
Each of these hints is discussed below.
So far, each time we clicked a "Web Pages" item, a link was added at the end of the Home's group of links. We can change where future links go, by clicking on any of the Site Structure's links or group heads. For instance, if we click on the "Home" group head, and then click on Web Page "Untitled 1", that page gets added immediately after "Home":
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Mouse down on any link, then drag into empty space and release the mouse button. The link is cut (removed) from the site structure.
Mouse down in empty space, then drag into the list and release the mouse button. The last cut link is pasted into the site structure.
Or you can drag with mouse down in one motion from one place to another in the list. Further details, showing how TMS-SiteNav's "Unlinked" list allows you to cut several links and then paste them back in a different order, are described in Rearranging Pages.
(If you want to see what our first simple link bar looks like on an actual page, then jump ahead to Insert.)
The tutorial continues in Add Sub Links - Dividing Web Site into Sections, which describes how to build up a complex site structure.