Linking and Navigation

After you’ve set up a Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 site to store your website documents and have created HTML pages, you’ll want to create connections from your documents to other documents.

Dreamweaver provides several ways to create hypertext links to documents, images, multimedia files, or downloadable software. You can establish links to any text or image anywhere within a document, including text or images located in a heading, list, table, layer, or frame.

For a visual representation of how your files are linked together, use the site map. In the site map you can add new documents to your site, create and remove document links, and check links to dependent files. For more information, see Viewing a site map.

There are several different ways of creating and managing links. Some web designers prefer to create links to nonexistent pages or files as they work, while others prefer to create all the files and pages first and then add the links. Another way to manage links is to create placeholder pages, which stand in for the final file and let you add links quickly and check them before you have actually completed all the pages. For more information about checking links, see Checking for broken, external, and orphaned links.

This chapter contains the following sections:

Understanding document locations and paths

Jump menus

Navigation bars

About image maps

Creating links

Managing links

Inserting jump menus

Using navigation bars

Using image maps

Attaching JavaScript behaviors to links

Checking for broken, external, and orphaned links