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Navigating this web site
Barry Tobin - AIMS webmaster
The Australian Institute of
Marine Science web site is, as is the nature of
most successful undertakings, growing in size.
What started out
as a collection of pages describing our research
activities in marine science has slowly been
evolving into a rather large collection of pages
not only covering our research, but also our
history, the region we live in, who we are and
our vision of the importance of marine science
for the future.
Our web site
broadly follows three main linked streams
of information, currently containing thousands of pages,
thousands of images and tens of thousands of hypertext links. As a web site increases
in size, hypertext linking, the very thing that
makes web viewing so attractive, increases the
complexity of the navigational layout of the
site.
While this linking
allows you to follow a path of interest, it has
the undesirable side-effect of getting you lost
when the links take you across different
information streams, with the only way out being
to either back-track through the pages or go to
the home-page and start again.
We had to re-think
the way we provide navigation throughout our site
and are attempting to provide a solution by the
use of the following structure and navigation aids.
General
structure of the AIMS web site
Level 1 - home
page.
Level 2 - information stream pages (About
AIMS, Research, Facilities).
Level 3 - content pages (in-depth
information).
Level n - more highly focused information.
The information stream you are in
is usually identified by the navigation links in the left-hand
pane of the page. On this page the left-hand pane is titled
Search and is therefore part of the search stream.
If you need information contained
within other streams then you can link directly to these via the
buttons running across the top of the page.
The bottom of each page also contain a group of links that
are designed to help you navigate your way
around. These navigation links are arranged under three
categories:
- INFORMATION STREAMS
About AIMS, Research,
News, Publications, ProjectNET etc.
- FINDING YOUR WAY
Lists many different ways to help you locate the information
you seek.
- NOTICES
Contain Copyright, Permissions, Privacy statement and our Web
awards
Additional links located under
these are for other areas of interest:
They currently contain links to AIMS Waypoint Newsletter, What's
new and links to other interesting sites.
Generally, where applicable, if a link takes
you away from our website it is designated with a
red arrowhead  and if a link remains
within our website it is designated with a green
arrowhead 
This site is optimised for
Whilst every effort is made to
support most of the major browsers, the AIMS web
site is optimised for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Tables are used extensively
throughout this site, so a browser that supports
tables is necessary to render the pages as
intended.
If you have any suggestions that you think may make your browsing
our web site more enjoyable then please e-mail
the Webmaster.
Barry Tobin
AIMS Webmaster
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The
AIMS Webmaster is a
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