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Plan site navigation (Project Server)

  • Article

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

Use this article in combination with the site navigation worksheet to design the navigation for your site.

  • Create a site navigation diagram

  • Understanding shared navigation

  • Determine which sites share the top link bar

  • Determine which additional links to add manually to the top link bar

  • Worksheet

Create a site navigation diagram

Make a diagram of the sites you want to create. For example, the following diagram is for a small travel company, Margie's travel, which has a set of internal sites to help them organize their core business: planning conventions in Las Vegas, NV.

Site diagram for Margie's travel

Your diagram may include a single site collection, as does the example above, or may have multiple site collections if you have a more complex set of sites. Be sure to include all top-level Web sites (such as /projectserver), subsites, Meeting or Document Workspace Sites, or other sites that you plan to create and leave room for future expansion. You many also want to include the lists and libraries for each site, especially if you are deciding whether to create a subsite for document storage or one or more document libraries. For more information about planning lists and document libraries, see Plan for content and search (Windows SharePoint Services).

Understanding shared navigation

The top link bar appears at the top of all pages in the site, below the site title. You can share the top link bar between sites in a site collection, or have unique top link bars for each site.

The top link bar can display two levels of sites in a site collection. For example, the top link bar for the Margie's Travel site collection could contain links for Margie's Travel Home, Office Management, Convention Planning, and Sales and Marketing. On the site, this top link bar looks like the following:

Home | Office Management | Convention Planning | Sales and Marketing

Note

Although the top link bar can display two levels of sites, this does not mean that all subsites at the second level have to be displayed on the top link bar. You can determine whether or not a subsite appears on the top link bar when you create it, or by configuring the navigation later in Site Settings.

However, by default, sites at a third level down in the hierarchy do not appear on the top link bar for the top-level Web site, even if they share the navigation. For example, the Tips and Reports sites would not appear on the top link bar of Margie's Travel Home because they are subsites of the Convention Planning site. If you want these sites to appear, you can add them to the top link bar manually, or create them at the second level in the site hierarchy (as subsites under Margie's Travel Home) rather than as subsites of the Convention Planning site.

The top link bar cannot be shared between sites in different site collections. However, you can always add a link to a site in a different site collection manually.

If you want the Home tab of a subsite to take you to the subsite's home page instead of the shared navigation's home page, then you should use unique navigation. Otherwise, you should use shared. For example, the Margie's Travel site collection could share the top links among all of the second-level sites, so that all sites have the same navigation:

Home | Office Management | Convention Planning | Sales and Marketing

This works for a small team like that in Margie's Travel, where all of the users in the organization work with all of the sites. Each user in the site collection uses each of the sites, so a shared top link bar is useful. However, if the Convention Planning and Sales and Marketing teams work fairly independently and don't need access to each other's sites, then the navigation for Margie's Travel could be customized to be shared at the second level, rather than the top level, as in the following:

Margie's Travel Home site: Home | Office Management

Convention Planning site: Convention Planning | Tips | Blogs

Sales and Marketing site: Sales and Marketing

Keep in mind that the new global navigation bar always contains a link back to the top-level site in the site collection. So, even though users of the Convention Planning site don't have a link to Margie's Travel Home in the top link bar, they do have a link to it in the global navigation bar, right above the site title, and are still one click away from home.

Note

Although the choice of whether or not to share a navigation bar is made during site creation, you can change this option later. You may have to create links manually if you change your mind, but you can do so easily by using the Top Link Bar page in Site Settings for the affected sites.

Whether you decide to share the top link bar or not, you can customize it to include links to any other URL that you need. Depending on the extent of customization you need, you can choose between the following methods to customize the top link bar.

  • If you want to add, remove, or rearrange the links in a top link bar, use the Top Link Bar page in Site Settings for the site.

  • If you want to create an entirely custom top link bar, and apply it to all sites in a site collection, or to sites in different site collections, use SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Software Development Kit (SDK).

Worksheet

Record your decisions about how to structure the site navigation on the Site Hierarchy Choices worksheet (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=73141) to use as a reference when you create the sites.

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