Navigation... Find your way around, or get lost

Surely it's just point and click? Nope. It ain't. Down in the bottom right of your browser window, there's a suspicious looking blue furry starfish, with an 'on' button and an 'off' button. Because you browser is Java-enabled, the 'on' button activates a Java applet which helps you to navigate round the Room. Click on the 'on' button and a new window appears to hold the navigation tool lovingly, like a mother dugong cradles her young.
Once the instrument has manifested itself in the window, looking all cool and blue and starfishy, you'll notice the buttons, which are just asking to be pressed, and the three areas outside the ring saying 'Radio', 'Mail' and 'Home', which also look pretty inviting, press-wise. Each button takes you to the homepage of the matching section written inside the ring, while the areas outside bring up our spanking new radio, a mail box and take you back to the What's new page. When your mouse is over a button that is active, the button lights up, and if your mouse is over the hotspots outside the field, the starfish wobbles alarmingly for a second or two.

It looks pretty much like this, but floating in its own window
When you press a button to move into a section, the button you pressed starts to flash, and the starfish changes colour to match the button. The names inside the ring also change to be the sub-sections within the section you have entered. If you pressed 'Stuff' the starfish would turn orange, and the inner sections would now be 'Angry stuff', 'Funny stuff' and 'Readers' letters'. That way you can navigate straight to any of the sub-sections without resorting to clicking on the individual homepages. Clicking on the starfish from inside any section takes you back to the top level of the navigator, with its blue starfish and the seven main sections displayed for your clicking pleasure. This means that you can get to any part of the site from any other just using the navigator.

When you click on your browser, the navigator disappears behind it, but you can bring it to the front just by running your mouse over the starfish in the bottom right hand frame. Clicking on the 'off' button turns the navigator off and gives you back some memory, but the applet stays in the background so that when you turn it on again, it appears with minimal delay.

We've included as many links as possible within each of the sections so that you don't have to keep bringing the navigator back up to move around. You can also navigate using the boring old homepage technique. At the bottom of the What's new page (the first page you see when you enter the Room), there are links to the homepages of all the sections. If you don't like the navigator, all you do to get around is use these links to move to the section you want to see, and when you want to move to a new section, just click on the 'What's New' icon in the top frame, and use the links at the bottom of the page to move to the new section. Off you go.