Website Navigation within the Header - php

Question

I am having trouble properly setting up navigation on my website. I am putting the navigation into my header and I want to get all of the links to work no matter what layer in the file structure that the webpage is on.
This is my file structure:
Website (directory)
index.php
resources (directory)
includes (directory)
html_codes.php
Game (directory)
game_info.php
resources
Characters (directory)
characters_info.php
Players (Directory)
players_info.php
Inside the html_codes.php is a function that builds the header for the website. I use this function to create the header at the top of all of my web pages. However the hyperlinks that navigate around the website do not work in any layer except the top-level directory because their relative position has changed.
Is there a way to get the links to work in
./index.php
./game/game_info.php
./game/Characters/characters_info.php
./game/Characters/Players/players_info.php
from the same create_header() function?
My create_header() function:
function create_Header(){
echo '
<div id="top_header">mywebsite.com </div>
<nav id="top_menu">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Game</li>
<li>Characters</li>
<li>Players</li>
<ul>
</nav>
';
}
*********************************EDIT***************************************
Okay, I used your suggestions and it solved some problems and created others.
First off, turning the paths from relative to absolute worked but it required that I change the path names to
/Website/index.php
/Website/game/game_info.php
/Website/game/Characters/characters_info.php
/Website/game/Characters/Players/players_info.php
which is fine but I don't understand why. I assume it is because the Website directory is a sub-directory for C:\xampp\htdocs\Website.
The other issue is that my include functions don't work with this absolute path.
The relative path for the include inside of game_info.php before was
include("./../includes/html_codes.php");
which did and still does work.
I have tried both
include("/includes/html_codes.php");
include("/testphp/includes/html_codes.php");
and they did not work.

Answer 1

Two things
1. i recommend not making capitalized folder names in your source and in this header. otherwise some browsers may require the capitalization by your users. which isn't really standard.
2. i recommend you use absolute paths (removed .)
function create_Header(){
echo '
<div id="top_header">mywebsite.com </div>
<nav id="top_menu">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Game</li>
<li>Characters</li>
<li>Players</li>
<ul>
</nav>
';
}

Answer 2

Put a forward slash / in front of your paths to make them absolute.
Go home
This will ensure that you're always starting from the same place (root), and that your links are independant from the hierarchy.
If your website is live, you can use an absolute URL like this one :
Go home

Answer 3

./ is relative to the current directory. There are two ways to solve it. The first one: keep using relative paths, but let them move up as well. So if you are on ./game/Characters/characters_info.php, the directory is ./game/Characters/, and the path to home is ../../index.php.
So you'll need to know not only the depth of the current page, you'll need to get up to a level that is shared between the current page and the target page. After all, both could be two levels deep, but still are in a different directory.
I think a better (at least much easier) way is to use an absolute path. To do that, you can just start with a / to have the absolute path from the domain name.
Optionally, you could configure an 'installation path' or 'base directory' to start each path with. It could default to just '/', but you could set it to another value if the site was entirely in a subdirectory.
So the header would look like:
<div id="top_header">mywebsite.com </div>
<nav id="top_menu">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Game</li>
<li>Characters</li>
<li>Players</li>
<ul>
</nav>
Or, with a base path variable, you can move the site to another directory, just change the variable, and everything will still work. Very convenient for testing and development. The normal value for this variable can just be ''.
<div id="top_header">mywebsite.com </div>
<nav id="top_menu">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Game</li>
<li>Characters</li>
<li>Players</li>
<ul>
</nav>