page4's page management differs from its competitors in many important ways. Therefore, some basic facts and explanations of what you can do with page4. This information will help and facilitate your work and understanding immensely.
First of all, we should clarify some terms. A website consists of content, which is usually divided into so-called pages, and navigation, which contains links to the individual pages.
Navigation points
Many users refer to the links in a navigation as "buttons", probably because these links can be clicked on like a button or because many navigations are designed so that the links look like buttons. We refer to the links in a navigation as navigation points or simply as pages or page links. Navigation points is the best term in our opinion, because you can navigate to any content on your website using the individual terms (points) in the navigation.
Navigation levels
If you have a lot of content (pages), they are usually organized by topic. If you are a photographer, you probably have many different topics you take photos on. On your computer you organize these photos into folders and subfolders. You can do the same on your website. In this case you have a main page and this main page has subpages with more content.
There are two ways to display such dependency.
With the help of a navigation that expands and with the help of a navigation that is divided into two sections.
Expanding navigation
With a navigation that expands, the following happens: You click on a main page and this opens an area docked to the main navigation. It opens an area where you can see the subpages of the clicked page. Subpages can also have their own subpages. If you now click on a subpage in the expanded menu that has subpages of its own, another area opens up, usually to the right, showing all the subpages of the selected subpage. Such nested page structures are also called layers. And since we are in navigation, we call this structure navigation levels.
Split navigation
In a navigation that is split into two areas, the main pages, that is, all the pages in the top level are in one area and all the sub-pages, that is, all the other levels are displayed in a second area. It is often the case that the main level is arranged horizontally and placed below or above the header image, and the sub-levels are placed in the sidebar (sidebar) on the left or right. If you click on a main page that has sub-pages, all direct sub-pages will be displayed in the sidebar. If you then click on a subpage in the sidebar, which itself has subpages, this page in the sidebar virtually unfolds and shows all existing subpages, usually indented to the right. This way you can get to any existing page very quickly and then display it.
10 navigation levels
How many navigation levels are useful? Some systems have only 3 navigation levels. If you look at the discussions of the users of these systems, it becomes clear that this is extremely little. Especially if you want to make multilingual pages and you already have to use up the main level for the language selection. Other systems have an infinite number of levels. However, at the same time, a very unfortunate page management design, so that it is extremely difficult to manage the levels when a certain level is exceeded.
Our page4 system is quite capable of managing an unlimited number of levels from a technical point of view. Nevertheless, we decided to limit the number of levels to 10. This is a limit that is not usually exhausted by any website. So you should never reach your limits in terms of structuring your pages.
Also, you have to consider how your visitors will react if they have to navigate through a lot of levels to read a topic they are interested in. So it is very important that you think about the structure of your website and always keep your visitors in mind, because for these visitors you usually create your website.