Your Private Label site has unlimited wikis. And each one of those wikis has unlimited pages. And the more people use the site, the more pages and wikis you’re going to have, and the more information your site is going to hold, and, unfortunately, the more difficult it gets to access the single piece of information you are looking for at a given moment.
Building navigation into your Private Label site will help: links, instructions, and the features of Wikispaces Private Label itself will give you everything you need to guide your users effortlessly through a wiki environment that works the way you need it to.
What do we mean by “navigation”?
Well, we mean a lot of things. There are some tools built right into Wikispaces Private Label that make it easy for users to find the wikis they need and move between them without too much confusion. And you, as site admin (or even as organizer of a single wiki), have resources for building road maps and setting up road signs to tell visitors where they are, where to go, and where to find the information they need.
Simply put, “navigation,” means all those things, all the constructs and tools, that help you and your users move around your site and find the information you need quickly and easily.
Your www wiki as map
The first place that people see when they visit your site is the www wiki, which makes it the perfect spot to put up a map.
You’ll want to think about how people use your site, and what kind of map they need. You could give them an atlas (say, an alphabetical list of wikis), telling your users and guests everything that’s in your site, and what it connects to, and where to find it. Or you could put up a treasure map, showing only the most important parts of your site, and only enough direction to get them there. Or anything in between.
The Link icon in your editor toolbar will let you link to any page in any wiki in your entire site. (Actually, you can even link to any anchor in any page in any wiki on your site, but that’s another blog post.) Link to the Home pages of wikis that people will want to see in their entirety. Or link to individual pages where your most valuable resources are posted.
If you want more instruction about how to set up navigation within a single wiki, check out our blog post on subpages and wiki navigation.
Membership as self-navigation
But we don’t want you to feel like you have to do all the work. In Wikispaces, individual users have tools to build the navigation that’s the best fit for them.
- User Dashboard: When a logged-in user goes to their account dashboard, they will see a list of all their Favorite Wikis. Any wiki that the user is a member (or organizer) of is automatically added to this list, as is any wiki they edit and any wiki where they’ve joined a discussion. They can also add wikis to the list by typing them into the Add a Wiki to This List box.
- My Wikis: The green arrow at the top of every page is a quick menu of the user’s top 20 favorite wikis. All they have to do is move their mouse over that arrow, and pick the link from the list.
That’s the general idea. If you’ve found some specific tricks for setting up navigation in your Private Label site, please let us know about them in the comments section below. And if you have questions about navigation that we haven’t answered, just shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com.