I've promised a flood of posts demonstrating how much I learned at Mindsharp's Power End User training over the last three days, and now it's time to ante up.

Over lunch today, my colleagues were asking me to identify the single item that I learned during the training that was most powerful but, honestly, I wasn't able to provide an answer.  The best I could say by way of response was that I learned so much that it's impossible to pick just one item as being king of the proverbial hill.  By way of evidence, I mentioned that I'd taken "ten or twelve" pages of notes over the three-day summit (not counting additional notes scribbled in the training manual) and, since I just counted them, I can state unequivocally that I took fully fifteen pages of notes.  And even that doesn't adequately indicate the amount of new-to-me SharePoint knowledge I acquired, as there are  several instances in my notes where I wasn't able to capture everything I wanted, and so I simply jotted down, "refer to the book," or the like.

"OK, enough already, John, we hear you ... you learned a lot, we get it.  Now will you please stop telling us how much you learned, and just start showing us already!"

Why, yes, since I am but your humble servant, I will now commence to do just that. 

I'm going to start on the ground floor, and I intend to march through what I learned in the order in which new-to-me knowledge was acquired.  In some cases, there may be some aspects of a given area that I was aware of previously, but which were clarified immensely as a result of the Mindsharp presentation.  I'm going to start with the most basic level of knowledge today, which is: Just what the heck do you call some of the core navigational regions of a SharePoint page?  I know I've assigned my own names to some of these navigational areas in this space before, and I hope I've provided enough context when doing so that it's been clear what I've been talking about, but hey, now I know the official name (or names, in some cases) for these core navigational areas, so it's time to start using them.

To wit, let's carve up the following chunk of my sandbox page, and identify: the Title Bar, the Top Link bar, the Quick Launch bar, and the Breadcrumbs:

Granted, these may all be painfully obvious to even the most green newbie (especially now that I've given you a list of names from which to play mix and match), but for the sake of helping me get in the habit of referring to these areas by their official names, please allow me to introduce them.

First up, there's the Title Bar which, by the way, is completely customizable.  On my test site, the the title bar is represented by the words "John Anderson's Site" and is hyperlinked to the test site home page itself.  It doesn't have to be simply text in that space though, and can be replaced with any image, company logo, or whatever you like:

Just beneath the Title Bar is the Top Links Bar, which appears as hyperlinks displayed in a tab format.  Typically, the Top Links bar is going to be used for core navigation throughout your site (with the portal/home page appearing as the first tab on the left, followed by the primary sub-sites that live "beneath" that top-level page):

Stretching horizontally beneath the Top Links Bar are your Breadcrumbs.  This row of hyperlinks show you where you are within the site, level by level, from the home page on down through sub-sites.  You can use the Breadcrumbs as shortcuts back to any area you've previously visited in your session:

The final core navigation element I want to touch on is the mighty Quick Links Bar, which is displayed vertically along the left "rail" of your page.  The Quick Links Bar will typically share a number of links in common with both the Top Links Bar and the Breadcrumbs, but presents them in a more organized manner.  At the top of your Quick Links Bar is the "View All Site Content" link, which is ever-present in the event that you need to see everything on the site on one page in an organized fashion.  Beneath that link are several buckets of major categories, each of which will display the contents within those areas.  Categories are also completely customizable:

And this concludes your tour of some of the core navigational areas of a SharePoint site.  Hope you enjoyed it!