Finding your way around the site

Most of this site is an archive of material relating to CUCC expeditions in Austria, with smaller sections for current CUCC activities and exCS. This page is intended as a "roadmap" and guide to using the copious links provided on most pages. The site is logically structured, but the structure may not be immediately obvious if you aren't yet familiar with it.

All the informational pages have copious links to other relevant pages throughout their text. A concise table of links at the bottom of each page can take you to index pages for a more radical change of topic. If you don't know where to start, try the index by subject. If you are interested in a particular cave, go for the index by cave. To see a map and links to each area, try the index by area page.

Within pages, links come in a variety of forms, each of which is most useful in a particular situation:

Every page has links from within its text, leading to related pages. These are most useful if you are following a complex cave description described over several pages, or if you are just browsing for new insights.

Many pages have illustrations, usually small images to speed loading. Most of these are linked to pages with a full size image and some explanation - just click on the image to see this. There will be links back to the description, to more pages of pictures, and often to other relevant pages.

Every page has a table of links at the bottom like the one below. These are useful if you are reading the full page, and then want to move on to a related topic.

Some pages act as index pages, such as a cave exploration history linked to the write-ups of each trip, or a glossary of passage names linked to cave description pages. Each line or list item has a link to the relevant point in another page. If you see a year of exploration highlighted as a link, it will take you to an index of information about the expedition of that year.

Logbook pages often have sets of links to next and previous trips in the same cave at the end of each write up, so you can follow logically the exploration of a given area or passage, even when the trips were written up in the logbook out of sequence, and mixed up with trips to other places.

Finally (and new after the 1997 expedition), a number of key pages have a navigation bar at the top, with links to home pages, main indices, surface descriptions, rigging guides, overviews and virtual tours. These pages are ones most likely to be visited when searching for particular information. As you may not actually want to read all of the page, this navigation bar is more convenient than scrolling to the links table at the end of the page (which may well be more comprehensive, however). The icons used are described below. Each is used with a keyword which will appear instead and performs the same function if you aren't loading images:

The first five icons have the same destinations whereever you find them (and are working links from this page, too).

A link to the top level CUCC Home page

A link to the top level Expedition Home page

A link to the main info/topics index for the expedition

A link to the index of all caves for the expedition

A link to the list of all (paper) published articles and the logbooks (almost all of which are now on the website too, and can be reached from this list).

The remaining icons are context-dependent. They take you to a page which is most relevant to the page you are already seeing:

A link from a cave or walk-in description to the area description for that area.

A link from a cave description to a graphical rigging guide for that cave or part of the cave.

A link from a page of a complex cave description to the overview page for that cave.

A link from a cave description to a "Virtual Tour" page with thumbnails of all the photographs of that cave.

A link from within the Kaninchenhöhle cave description to its Glossary of passage names, which acts as an index to that cave.

For Kaninchenhöhle, Stellerweghöhle, Puffball and eventually other cave descriptions, there should be a link to a history page, which lists every trip with links to the logbook write-ups. These links aren't yet all in place, and I'm struggling to design an icon - but look in the links table at the foot of the page.

... and finally, to illustrate the point, a table of links like those on most of our pages:

What's