[ The PC Guide | Site Guide | Site Design and Features ]

Navigation

Due to the large amount of content on this site, I have spent many hours carefully considering ways to ensure that it can be navigated easily. There are in fact several ways to "get around" the world of The PC Guide:

• Index Frames: You can access all of the pages of the site in their normal hierarchical structure by using the nested index frames that appear on the left-hand side of each page.
• Global Navigation Links: There are four navigation links at the bottom of each page: Home, Search, Topics and Up (not all pages have an "Up" link). The first two are pretty self-explanatory, and allow you to reload the site at its top-most level or go to the search page from anywhere on the site. The "Topics" link loads the site's Topic Index for easy browsing of the whole site from a single page.
  The "Up" link loads the frame set one level up from the current one. If you come to a page from a totally different area of the site, "Up" won't take you back to where you came from the way your browser's "Back" button does. "Up" is intended rather to allow those who jump into the middle of the structure in any area of the site to re-establish the structure's context for easier navigation in the new area where they end up.
• "Next" Links: Virtually every content page on the site has a "Next" link at the bottom of the page. This enables you to move smoothly from page to page and read the site in a linear fashion, as some readers prefer to do, instead of having to travel the hierarchical structure of the site. These links are prefaced with a hand icon, like this:
• "Context" Links: At the top of each content page is the title of the current page; above that appear the titles of the current page's "ancestors" (the page above it in the hierarchy, then the one above that one, etc.) These let you quickly move back and forth within the hierarchy, and also help you remember where you are.

Next: Hyperlink Legend

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