A Site Tour

The traditional way of visualizing computer documents is somewhat like a library. You have a building, which has many floors, each floor has many rooms, each room has many shelves, each shelf has many rows of books, and FINALLY, each row has actual books that we can read.  The web site can be viewed using the same kind of physical structure.  In our case, we have a home page with a large collection of member folders.  Each member folder may contain some content we can look at, or it may contain further folders which then contain documents.

The Breadcrumbs line shows you a path from the Home page to the current document or folder. By clicking  on a breadcrumb, users can back up and find other items by the same member.

Breadcrumbs are useful for people who like to browse information the old-fashioned way, much like simply strolling through the stacks of a library.  Once you are finished with one document, you can back up to the container and select another document from the same container.  In our case, breadcrumbs allow you to stroll through the contributions of a particular author.  However, you should be aware that the organization may be pretty awful, because authors can usually rely upon the site search features to organize their documents.