5  Site navigation elements

The subsite navigation bar provides quick access to major items of the site.

The Home link is not shown on the home page. The Categories link will not be shown if every category for the subsite already has a link in the bar. If there is only the main subsite, then the Subsites link and names are not shown. The site owner may have chosen to only show the Subsites link and none of their name links.

There are several pages that list site elements of the same type.

There is no list of the default category of a subsite, but its pages are usually available through links elsewhere, such as home pages in the top navigation bar or Subsites page, or in the Subsite links subsection of the Links section at the bottom of pages.

The Navigation article also allows a catalog, which is like a categories page, except that it is an ordered list that can contain up to 20 articles or categories from anywhere on the site. This makes it suitable for themed content that may span multiple categories or subsites.

Being able to highlight the latest articles allows repeat visitors to catch up quickly.

All three show the latest articles for the current subsite, latest first, up until their number limit. The Latest articles page can be bookmarked in a browser, and the Feed can be added to a feed reader in some email clients or a browser extension.

Important content can be accessed by adding special links in key navigation areas.

In addition to providing links to a subsite's Categories page and other subsites, the Subsite navigation bar also allows up to five custom links to be added to the start. These can be for internal articles or categories, but also external links. These links are meant to be quick links to key areas of the site or closely related sites, such as a store, so that those familiar with the site can get to where they want to go straight away.

If the added links include all the current categories for the subsite, the Categories link will not be shown.

The Subsite links subsection of the Links section at the bottom of each public page contains links to the more utilitarian pages of a site, such as the Contact page. Up to three custom links can be added before those for other pages that may useful for visitors, such as a mini bios page.

Some major visual linking facilities are available for enhanced discovery of content.

Cards provide an informative way to help visitors find what they might be interested in. They include a rectangular image, with a heading above and an introduction below. A selection is made by clicking on the heading to go to the target article or category.

While the image is sourced from the target's basic aside, the heading and introduction come from its navigation text (or heading/headline if none) and its introduction. They are two wide for larger viewing areas, but typically single on a phone in portrait mode. There can be up to eight cards in the array. There is a Wide first mode that spreads the first card over the full width with a thick border and larger text, which provides significantly more prominence for a major part of the site.

A gallery is a collage of images from which a visitor can click on one to go to the target article or category. Typically, a target article may provide a larger version of the image, along with a description of what the image relates to.

The images are extracted from the central parts of the target article or category's basic aside image, auto-sized vertically to even heights, shown four wide for larger viewing areas, but lesser on phones in portrait mode. There can be up to 20 images in a gallery.

Both cards and galleries are defined by selecting target articles and categories on the Links page, accessed from the Links to section of the Article head page for a Navigation article, which includes home pages.

Extra links can be defined for each article and subsite to help visitors discover similar content on the site and other sites.

At the bottom of every article, links to Related articles and Related sites can be added. These help discoverability by showing readers more of what they are interested in. They can also be useful for increasing search engine ranking. Links to authoritative sites that have a measurable relevance to the page they are on can enhance the authority of the page. Cross links between articles of a site can enhance the perceived integration of the site. Note that Related articles can include links to categories.

Each article and subsite can have up to five of each defined. What ends up in each list is whatever are defined by the article, followed by the same from the subsite to make the up maximum of five that can show in each list. For example, if an article defines three links, while its subsite defines four, the resultant list will contain the three article links, followed by the first 5 - 3 = 2 of the subsite links.

Use subsite links sparingly and only for very general topics, and use as many article links for very specifically-related links as possible. If a link target appears in both the article and subsite related links, only the article's one is shown.

Footnotes allow adding extra information without cluttering up the main body of an article.

Footnotes are a single rich-text element, so are not meant for a lot of content. Only two are allowed for each parent. They are placed at the end of an element so that reading of the element is not impeded by clutter. In general, each element they can be attached to should only cover one item in the surrounding thread, so only one footnote should suffice. Sample footnote:[1]

If adding too many footnotes to an article, perhaps consider restructuring it or breaking it up into multiple articles in an overall category. Reading should not require excessive jumping around a page. Footnotes can be put on a spike and inserted or appended as, or replace, any of the elements that they can be attached to.