Creating a Reusable Navigation Menu

Nearly all web sites and web applications on the internet today have some form of user friendly navigation system that allows you to jump from page to page with ease from any location in the website. Most interface developers know how cumbersome it is to place this navigation menu on every single page in the website. Moreover, when something in the navigation changes such as a page name or title, every instance of the menu needs to be updated across all pages.

Dreamweaver developers are probably familiar with the use of templates to solve this recurring problem, whereby a single template for the menu may be defined and then placed onto the web pages requiring the navigation menu. You can then manage a single template and when you make changes, those changes are automatically propagated across all web pages using that template.

VS.NET developers have access to a similar style of implementation, but its design is slightly more object oriented. It also takes advantage of the code-behind pattern, where a front end HTML designer can implement an interface separately from the server side code.

In this tutorial we’ll examine this reusable pattern called a Web User Control, and implement a simple demonstration of how this user control can be used to construct a navigation menu component that can be placed on any page in your web application.