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Establish hierarchies for navigation

Boris Pocatko, Tomas Nosek
4 minutes
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Whether your content is displayed to your visitors through a website, mobile app, or a different channel, it often comes with a hierarchical purpose: navigation. To establish the navigation structure, you need to create a relationship between each hierarchy level. Dive in to get the ropes on organizing your content to build optimal navigation for your visitors.

Separate content from navigation

One of the reasons why modular content platforms, such as Kontent.ai, become popular is the fact that the content created is reusable among different channels, such as websites, mobile apps, smartwatch apps, or chatbots. Creating quality content isn’t trivial, so if you create it, you most likely want to present it effectively on different devices. However, what can work for websites doesn’t work for mobile apps and other devices. While websites often have SEO parameters and URL slugs, mobile apps divide content into screens. To get the flexibility in using the same content on different devices, create a content type for the actual content, then create a content type for navigation in each channel. In Web Spotlight, Home and Page content types are already created for your website navigation.

Link content with navigation

So that your website or mobile app knows what content to display within a specific location, connect your navigation items to your content. Create a Linked items element in the navigation item’s content type. In its items, you’ll use the element to link the actual content. You can connect it the other way around if it’s more comfortable for content creators in your case. However, the first approach proves to be better in most cases. If you use Web Spotlight, use the Subpages element instead of the Linked items element.

Adjust the diagram for your navigation

If your project represents a website, this adjustment will most likely require more changes to the current state of your content model diagram. In the sample website, the flow of the relationship changed. Instead of the Articles and Landing pages linking to Navigation items (through the SEO metadata snippet), the Navigation item was renamed to Page, and it now leads to either an Article or a Landing page.
You can zoom in and out of the diagram using your browser’s zoom options.
It expresses the idea behind the web structure. A website contains a page tree. The page tree contains pages. Pages can be articles, landing pages, or pages with another purpose. Also, Articles and Landing pages contain only the actual content this way.
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Dive deeper into navigationCheck out our article focused on best practices for navigation to get more detailed instructions in this area.
  • Separate content from navigation
  • Link content with navigation
  • Adjust the diagram for your navigation