Creating a Custom Link Bar in FrontPage 2002

To understand link bars, think of a scene from a Saturday morning cartoon: Bugs Bunny is lost in the desert, and while searching for an oasis, he comes upon a signpost stuck into sand. The signpost contains markers pointing every which way: "This way to Cairo," "This way to New York," "This way to Mars."

Link bars give your visitors a similar array of choices. Link bars are a collection of hyperlinks leading to the other pages inside your Web site. By placing a link bar inside each page of your site, you help your visitors find their way around. Think of link bars as signposts: "This way to the home page," "This way to the feedback form." With a single click, visitors are whisked off to the destination of their choice.

FrontPage 2002 gives you two methods for creating link bars. You can let FrontPage generate link bars based on a navigation structure you build, or you can create custom link bars containing links of your choosing.

Custom link bars require a little more initial work than navigation structure-based link bars, but are more flexible and will save you lots of time as your site grows. You can also create several custom link bars that you can insert in different pages or sections of your Web site.

Custom link bars work only if you publish your site on a host server that has the 2002 version of FrontPage Server Extensions installed.

To insert a custom link bar, follow these steps:

1. In the page, place the cursor where you want the link bar to appear.

2. Choose Insert-->Navigation.

The Insert Web Component dialog box appears, with the Link Bars component type selected.

3. In the dialog box's Choose a Bar Type list box, click Bar with Custom Links, and then click Next.

New options appear in the dialog box. These options enable you to choose how the link bar looks.

4. In the Choose a Bar Style list box, click the illustration that reflects how you'd like the link bar to look, and then click Next.

After you click Next, new options that enable you to choose whether you want a horizontal or vertical link bar appear in the dialog box.

5. In the Choose an Orientation box, click either the horizontal or vertical orientation illustration, and then click Finish.

Nope, you're not really finished. The Create New Link Bar dialog box appears prompting you to name your link bar.

6. In the dialog box's Name text box, type a brief name.

Depending on the setup of your Web site, you can create more than one custom link bar (say, one link bar for the site's top-level pages, and another for the site's individual sections). So, choose a name that reminds you of the link bar's placement or purpose in the site.

7. Click OK.

The dialog box closes, and the Link Bar Properties dialog box appears (see Figure 1). Note that, despite the same name, this dialog box is different than the dialog box that appears when you create a link bar based on your site's navigation structure.

Figure 1: The Link Bar Properties dialog box appears when you insert a custom link bar into your page.

8. In the dialog box, click Add Link.

The Add to Link Bar dialog box appears. This dialog box looks and acts very much like the Insert Hyperlink dialog box.

9. In the dialog box, specify the details for the first hyperlink in the custom link bar, and then click OK.

The Add to Link Bar dialog box closes, and the Link Bar Properties dialog box comes back into view.

10. To add another link, click Add Link, and repeat Step 9 as many times as is necessary to complete the link bar.

If you want the link bar to contain links to the home page or the current page's parent page, in the Add to Link Bar dialog box, click the corresponding check boxes.

11. When the link bar is complete, click OK in the Link Bar Properties dialog box.

The dialog box closes, and the link bar appears in the page.

FrontPage can also generate link bars containing a linear set of back and next links. These link bars lead the visitor through links you specify sequentially (similar to a slide show). You can either create a new custom link bar with back and next links, or you can convert a link bar you created earlier.