Principles
of Design
Rule 4
|
|
Principles
of Design |
| Leave a Trail of Breadcrumbs Many visitors will arrive at your site, not through the first page, but through some lower-level page that happened to turn up when they did a web search on Cheezy Puffs (or some other text contained in that particular page). Give these users a path back to the top of your site, either by placing a Home button on every single page, or by linking to another major subpage. Basically, people should be able to get to the "starting gate" of your web site (usually called the home page) in under three clicks. Sometimes, especially with frames, it isn't practical to put Home links on every page. If you are in that situation, make sure there is a default page in every directory that links to the top. This enables someone who links to "http://nowhere.com/cheezy/puffs.htm" to backspace over the "puffs.htm" and get a higher-level page with the URL "http://nowhere.com/cheezy/". In this case, you'll want to make absolutely sure that your default pages in all your directories link to your home page. I've been at many pages where I thought, "Wow, this is great information...I wonder if there's more," and then not been able to find an entry into the site. |
|||
| Tutorial Navigation |
  |
||