Templates index

Navigation and type of pages

Level 0 of navigation

• Home page with left menu - left column = 150 px
  The left column is 150 px and its width is given by the Main navigation menu.
  The Main navigation menu is presents on all the web site pages and designed for containing the first two level of the navigation. On the home page it displays only the main topics, and only once a single main topic has been selected, the corresponding second level items are revealed.
• Home page without left menu - left column = 115 px
  The left column is 115 px. The main navigation menu is placed on the right side of the page and it can display the second level navigation items.
  It is possible to adopt this Template for the Home page only in this cases.
  The use of images instead the menu are suggested. As alternative see the home page without images
• Supplementary navigation page: the site map

First and second level of navigation

For both first or second level of navigation there are two different cases:

The section is further subdivided in sub-sections

• Case 1 - This case typically occurs at first level, the section's main page aims at introducing and giving access to the second level pages. - See an example
  This type of page is laid out on 1 column and can have three functionalities
  • Simply introducing the section content - Example 1
  • Describing with a blurb all the links leading to the second level. It also possible to place links at the third level (if existing) - Example 1, Example 2 , Example 3
  • Highlighting items at the second level (maybe also introducing the section content) - Example 1
  • Note: the section's main page can be skipped, in this case one of the second level pages has to be promoted as the section's main page Example 1
• Case 2 - This case typically occurs at second level, the section's main page gives the access to a third level of navigation.
  There could be two possibilities:
• The text is very long and the links leading to the third level are few, so a page of 1 column is used with a menu aligned on the right - Example 1 - Example 2
• The text and the links leading to the third level are balanced, so a page of 2 column is used with the menu placed into the right column - Example 1. In case the subsequent pages contain long texts, in order to use all the horizontal space, the right navigation menu may become a pull-down menu.
The pull-down menu is used to avoid to the user to go back to the section's main page to select another second level link. Note that by default the width of the two columns is 75% on the left and on the right 25%. It can be changed, see the example using 60% - 40%

The section is made up by one page only laid out on 1 column (no sub-sections)

• Case 1 - This case can occur at first or second level, it is a Navigation page laid out on 1 column leading to Detail pages or Destination files
  Typically it is a list of links such as Publications, Events, Useful links etc - Example of "Useful links", Example of "Publications".



• Case 2 - This case can occur at first or second level, its a Destination page laid out on 1 column
  A destination page is page containing text, without other links leading to the second or the third level of the hierarchical navigation. In other words a destination page is the destination of the navigation path, to continue the navigation the user can go back to the previous page or can select another section from the main navigation menu. See Example 1
  This other Example show us a page wich acts mainly as a destination page but, having a link (on the right top) to a related subject it acts partially also as navigation page.

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