The Site Menu

Basic Structure

The Site menu is an unordered list of links that describes the structure of the web site.

<ul>
<li><a href="/cas/">College of Arts and Sciences</a></li>
<li><a href="/charlton/">Charlton College of Business</a></li>
<li><a href="/engineering/">College of Engineering</a></li>
<li><a href="/nursing/">College of Nursing</a></li>
<li><a href="/cvpa/">College of Visual and Performing Arts</a></li>
</ul>

This list is parsed into the site menu.

Location in the Site

The site menu list must be located in the /includes/welcome.html file. The /includes/ folder should be located in the root folder of the site, the same folder that contains the site's Application.cfm. The list should be the only content in the welcome.html file, aside from any OmniUpdate comment tags.

Allowed Tags and Proper Coding

The site menu uses only the following tags: <ul>, <li>, <a>, and <span>. All other tags and their contents will be stripped by the cf_layout tag before processing. This is to ensure consistent formatting and behavior. Do not use any other HTML tags other than the four listed above.

In addition, please close all tags; i.e., use:

<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.umassd.edu/">UMass Dartmouth</a></li>
</ul>

instead of:

<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.umassd.edu/"">UMass Dartmouth
</ul>

This adheres to the Coding Best Practices.

Proper Links in the Site Menu

• The site menu links are regular web links- they can link to anything inside and outside the site. However, this can lead to problems in using the menu. Please keep in mind the following best practices involving menu links:
• Only link to web pages and sites. Do not link to images, Word documents, Excel files, PDF documents, or any other file that is not a web page. Instead, create a web page that explains what the document is, and how to view the document. If necessary, you can add a link to a program that will let people view the document. This applies to links to documents outside of your web site- either find a central page on that site, or create a page on your site that explains what the user will be downloading. If the file is an image, link to a page containing that image.
• A link should not be repeated in the menu. Do not link to the same file twice. The only exception is If when you link to separate anchors on the same page.
• The link text (i.e., the text that the user clicks on to go to a web page) should be the same as or similar to the title of the page you are linking to. This reassures users and helps them use your site more effectively.

About the Sub Menu

Coming Soon.