Ride Drive & Website Help Page

This page has been published to help guide you to a successful navigation experience of the Ride Drive website.

Unless you have clicked on a link from another website, which has then taken you to a specific page on this site, your first arrival point with Ride Drive will be the home page. This is the central and main navigation

Example of Ride Drive website menu, showing Advanced Driving for Standard Cars

index for the whole set of Ride Drive web sites, and from the home page you will have access to the rest of the website complex.

Page Menu Site Navigation System

Whichever web page you access you will find the same style menu system within the upper area of the left hand column⁄margin area. Within the menu there are underlined headings and these are called text hyperlinks. You can see an example within the illustration to the right of this page.

A text hyperlink is a descriptive word, or words arranged in a phrase, and each word or words in that string are a live link to a specific site location. This means when you click on the hyperlink you are immediately taken to another page or part of a page.

Of course, the word or phrase that makes up the link will give you a clue as to the subject matter you are being taken to.

Text hyperlinks are occasionally used within the text of the main body of a page, and again these will use words that provide information about what they link to. The linked words will also fit into the meaning of the sentance in which they appear. You can identify hyperlinks on this site quite easily, as they are all of a similar style and will look like this.

Breadcrumb Trail

At the top of each page, above the main heading, but still within the text area, there will be what is known as a breadcrumb trail. This is used to inform the web site visitor of their location within the site as they browse the various pages. At the beginning of the breadcrumb trail it says, "You Are Here", which is followed by a series of hyperlinks, beginning with Home. See illustration below.

With each navigation step that is made away from the Home Page it is marked by the breadcrumb trail. In the example given above you will have navigated to Performance Car Magazine, from where you will have selected the topic called Americana Part–1. From within that page you will have clicked on a link within that page that has taken you to, Americana Part–2.

You can now go back to any of the pages you visited along the way to your current location by use of the breadcrumb trail. For example, if you now wish to go back to the Performance Car Magazine page, all you need do is click on that part of the breadcrumb trail and you will be taken there.

Of course, the diagram above is simply that, a diagram, and therefore the links there are not live. You have to go to the actual pages to find examples that work.

Another visual aid that we have included to help you keep track of where you are is that of the menu spot. When you encounter the menu spot, such as the example in the diagram to your right, it is a marker to indicate which of the pages listed within the page menu is the the one you are viewing.

The menu spot marker will correspond to the indicated site page location by the breadcrumb trail.

If you encounter a red arrow in place of the menu spot marker, this is used to indicate your only method of exit. When you return to the top of this page you will see there is one positioned within this page menu.

Not All Links Are Text Links

As well as the text hyperlinks within the menus, breadcrumb trails and on–page text hyperlinks, this site uses some live–linked images to perform certain tasks. Four of the most common live images you will encounter are,

The Ride Drive Logo — Wherever there is a Ride Drive logo at the top left of a website page this will be a live link back to the home page of that site.
Back to Top Button — To be found at the bottom of almost every page, this graphic, when clicked, will take you to the top of the page you are viewing.
Make Contact Graphic — This takes the form of an image of a telephone, a computer mouse and an image of some text providing the email address and telephone number of the Ride Drive office. When clicked this will open your email screen ready fro you to send the message.
More >> Button — These are found on the pages that carry a list of the driving or motorcycle courses. Their purpose is to take you to futher information concerning the particular course the button appears adjacent to.

Sometimes a photographs or other illustration will be configured as a live link with which to navigate to another page, or even another site altogther. Particularly where photographs are concerned, these will often be links to larger versions of themselves. If this is the case the photograph concerned will have a small graphic placed at the bottom right corner representing a magnifying glass.

Pop–Up Pages

Some of the pages take the form of what are called Pop–Up pages. When you open a Pop–Up page, instead of the current page closing as the new one opens, the new page will open to cover your previous page. Sometimes, Pop–Up pages are full–size pages, and therefore cover the previous page completely, or they can be a smaller page.

You can tell if you have opened a Pop–Up page straight away, because if you look at your BACK button at the top left of your screen, you will see it has been greyed out and therefore inaccessible. Many of the photographs on this site allow you to open larger version of them and these will appear in Pop–Up pages with frames specially sized to fit the actual size of the picture. The page you are reading now is a Pop–Up page, although this time it is a full–size version.

To close the Pop–Up page you will either be provided with a Close Page text link, or you will need to click on the X in the top right corner of the window.

One Web Site Comprising of Five

The Ride Drive website is a very big site, and with so much content a great deal of effort has to be made to make it easy to navigate and as user friendly as possible. Although every page has the same corporate appearance, the website is actually five websites with their pages all interlinked.

It is perhaps easiest to think of each website as being a seperate department within the Ride Drive organisation, each with a corresponding domian name issued in accordance to genre. These domain names, with their corresponding material, are as follows.

www.ridedrive.co.uk — is the main hub of the whole site network and primarily dealing with high performance car driver training and related topics.
www.advanced–driving–course.co.uk — provides for customer who drive standard production cars, such as family cars and shopping cars.
www.fleet–driving–course.co.uk — offers services and traininb to the coporate vehicle fleet operator, or to those who drive their ownvehicles, but in connetcion with their work related activities.
www.advanced–motorcycle–course.co.uk — carries details of Ride Drive advanced motorcycle rider courses.
www.driving–phobia.co.uk — offes help, advice and details of the service provided by Ride Drive to those who suffer from anxiety and phobia when driving.

Here is a diangram that shows the relationship of the five domains. As you can see, www.ridedrive.co.uk forms the hub of the site group, and this is so as it carries the main menu. It is the centre of the navigation system.

Navigating the Content of the Main Ride Drive Site

Each of the five sites within the group has its own collection of pages and these are attached to the domain name that best represents the topic content. The groups of pages are also gathered under department headings, making the whole website browsing experience as simple as possible.