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Craig Grannell

"The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design"

If you have any questions, please
contact us,??? and to turn ???contact us??? into a link to the contact details page. This might
seem like common sense, but not every web designer thinks in this way.
Search-based navigation
Wikipedia has a search box within its navigation sidebar. It??™s said there are two types of
web users: those who eschew search boxes and those who head straight for them. The
thing is, search boxes are not always needed, despite the claims of middle managers the
world over. Indeed, most sites get by with well-structured and coherent navigation.
However, sites sometimes grow very large (typically those that are heavy on information
and that have hundreds or thousands of pages, such as technical repositories, review
archives, or large online stores, such as Amazon and eBay). In such cases, it??™s often not feasible
to use standard navigation elements to access information. Attempting to do so leads
to users getting lost trying to navigate a huge navigation tree.
Unlike other types of navigation, search boxes aren??™t entirely straightforward to set up,
requiring server-side scripting for their functionality. However, a quick trawl through
a search engine provides many options, including Google Custom Search Engine
(www.google.com/coop/cse/) and Yahoo Search Builder (http://builder.search.yahoo.
com/m/promo).
Creating and styling web page links
With the exception of search boxes, which are forms based on and driven by server-side
scripting, online navigation relies on anchor elements.


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