Have you ever been frustrated by navigation in SharePoint? While I’m sure Microsoft spent several hours developing the navigation in SharePoint (actually, I’m not sure of this…), it’s still cumbersome to use. For example, have you ever been deep in your site hierarchy when you just wanted to go up a level? Have you even thought you were on a different site than you actually were because the site name’s were the same? Yup, me too.

In this post, I’ll show you how to turn the standard “breadcrumb” trail

into a real breadcrumb trail

Let’s begin!

From the root of your site collection, go to

Site Actions » Site Settings » Galleries » Master pages and page layouts

If you do not already have a custom master page, create a copy of the v4.master page, and designate it as the custom master page for your site. Then, open up the master page in SharePoint Designer. Find the following section

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderSiteName" runat="server">
...
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

and replace it with

<asp:SiteMapPath Runat="server" ID="siteMapPath"
                 SiteMapProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider"
                 RenderCurrentNodeAsLink="true">
    <NodeStyle CssClass="ms-sitemapdirectional" />
    <PathSeparatorTemplate>
        <SharePoint:ClusteredDirectionalSeparatorArrow runat="server"/>
    </PathSeparatorTemplate>
</asp:SiteMapPath>