Site navigation bar

This is a very important option on the NavBar dialog, which turns on automatic linking so that buttons and links are added to your bar for you, as you add pages. And all changes you make to the bar are reflected on every page of the site as soon as you close the NavBar dialog.

Normally you have this option on only if you want your NavBar to appear on all pages of your website. However you can manually delete the bar from pages if desired.

The site navigation bar is also useful for automatically repopulating the menu items on a single button NavBar after converting it from a multi-button NavBar. See Single button NavBars for more info.

Moving and transforming a site navigation bar

If you move a site navigation bar on the page, the bar is also moved on all the other pages on which it appears. Similarly if you scale the bar to make it larger or smaller using the Selector Tool, again the same transformation is applied to the copy of the bar on the other pages. No other transformations of a NavBar using the Selector Tool are supported (rotation, skew, scaling in one dimension).

Automatic page linking

Whenever you add a new page to your site, a link to that page will be added to your site navigation bar for you and the new page will be given a copy of the bar, if it doesn't already have one. If your bar has an unused button on it, then the first such button will be linked to your new page. If all buttons are already linked, a new button is automatically added to the end of your bar and it is linked to the new page. In either case, the label of the button is changed to match the name of the new page, if it has a name, or to "New page" otherwise. Normally you will want to immediately edit this new label in the NavBar dialog.

When you delete a page from your website, the button linking to it on your site navigation bar is automatically deleted for you, on all pages of your site.

Turning site navigation bars on and off

When you turn the site navigation option on or off in the NavBar dialog, the change is reflected in all copies of that bar on all pages of your website.

Deleting a site navigation bar from a page

If you don't want the site navigation bar on a particular page of your site, you can simply click on it to select it on that page and hit "Delete". You'll be asked whether you want to delete the bar from just that page, or from all pages.

However after removing the bar from one or more pages, note that if you subsequently turn off the site navigation bar option (perhaps in order to edit the button design, which can't be done with the option on), and then later turn it back on again, the bar will be added automatically to all the pages of your site that don't have it.

Templates & Site navigation bars

All the single page templates in Elements have their NavBars set to be site navigation bars when you load them from the gallery to start a new website document. This means you can rapidly build a small website with all pages linked to the bar, without having to add buttons and page links manually. Similarly all website templates have site navigation bars turned on. If you don't want this behavior, simply turn off the site navigation bar option on the NavBar dialog.

The standalone NavBars presented with each theme in the gallery do not have site navigation turned on by default. This is because any user adding bars manually is less likely to want that bar on every page of their site, with a link to every page. But again, the option can easily be turned on in the NavBar dialog if required.

Other points to note

If you delete a button which points to one of your pages, or change the link on it to point elsewhere, no special action is taken to restore a button link to the page. It's assumed you decided that you didn't want a direct link to that page in your site navigation bar. New buttons and page links are only created when a page is added.