The Content Linking Component

A well-designed web site will provide the visitor with tools and guidance to navigate the site. ASP allows you to create one type of guidance tool by using the Content Linker, also called the NextLink component. You can create a list of pages in a specific order as a path through the site. Then on any given page in this path, the user can click on the Next or Previous buttons, and display the appropriate page in the path. The Content Linker even allows you to display a description of the next/previous pages. Additional features of the Content Linker allow you to program sophisticated jumps or loops. For example, the Content Linker would enable the following objectives:

• Tutorial
• Five-minute tour
• Review of new products (we'll use this as the example in this chapter)
• Multi-page forms

In this section of the chapter, we'll start with a very simple example, which you can have a go at yourself as we walk through the first Try-It-Out. Then we'll improve on the example in a step-by-step manner (with Try-It-Outs for you) until you have a very sophisticated set of navigation tools.