There are some wonderful new, and excellent old ways of setting up your sites navigation menu's also called navbars. The most popular and fastest method is the use of links like those on the sidebar and within the text of this site. While this method is a bit long in the tooth, it is the most universally supported method of connecting content in hypertext documents, and has enhanced new features that ensure it will remain around forever.

Image buttons are another popular variant of plain links that can also be used, in a more limited fashion to link documents together. The disadvantage with them, is they must also be loaded, along with the document from the server, before the page can be properly displayed, and hamper speedy access to your content, also increasing your sites bandwidth. To be effective, your server must be very fast, and if used on multiple pages, visitors have to know to set their browser preferences to load documents only once per session, or your site will seem very slow! Unless javascript is used, it is difficult to mark a link as visited with this method.

Image maps, like buttons but usually much larger are another option that allow users to point to various rectangular areas of a largish graphical image instead of plain text to make connections. This method shares the same problem as the use of several smaller buttons but may be a bit more reliable, as the fewer files needed, the less likely the page is to stall while loading. Using several image maps negates this advantage, and many less popular browsers do not support it. Another wrinkle, err rather, solution to this, is to make use of special server side image map files, that allow broken browsers to receive the linked document, by instructing your server to handle the "broken linking request" that those (ancient) browsers generate. This type of compatibility kludge is an annoying nuisance.

Thumbnail Selection is a widely used variant of the image button that allows many large images to be shown in a smaller 'thumbnail' format that speeds and enhances selection of them. Pages with numerous large images are a definite error, as they can take ages to load! Thumbnail selection is required whenever you wish to display various large images effectively, although it is not absolutely necessary, if you can use descriptive text links that are only slow to read and sort through.

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