The first twenty-one hours led you through the design and creation of your own Web pages and the graphics to put on them. Now it's time to stop thinking about individual Web pages and start thinking about your Web site as a whole. This hour shows you how to organize and present multiple Web pages so that people will be able to navigate among them without confusion, and ways to make your Web site memorable enough to visit again and again.
(No HTML tags covered in Hour 21.)
The Waldorf E-mail List(Figures 21.1 - 21.2)
With a good table of contents, you can effectively present a great deal of useful information on a single page.
New Visions Imports(Figures 21.3 - 21.4)
This small-business home page uses distinctive graphics and no-nonsense text to quickly convey the intended mood and purpose of the site. The consistent graphical theme makes it instantly clear that all the linked pages are part of the same site.
The Center for Journal Therapy(Figures 21.5 - 21.7)
The four links at the top of this page lead to a surprising wealth of information. It will help readers navigate a complex site without confusion if you avoid putting any page more than two or three links away from the home page, and always send readers back to a main category page (or the home page) after reading a subsidiary page.
Having seen all the fancy graphics and layout tricks in the book, you may be tempted to forget that a good old-fashioned outline is often the most clear and efficient way to organize a Web site.
If you produced pages similar to these as your first site, you'd probably be proud, and rightly so. But you can use the techniques you've learned in this hour to do even better.
This souped-up version looks sharper, loads faster, and presents more key information immediately. It also has a stronger look and more navigation aids. Also, the same graphics that appear on the home page are used as topic headers on each subsequent page. This has the double benefit of providing an immediate sense of where you are within the site, and making the pages load almost instantly.
"In all aspects of your site design, keep in mind the following fact: studies have repeatedly shown that people become confused and annoyed when presented with more than seven choices at a time, and people feel most comfortable with five of fewer choices. Therefore, you should avoid presenting more than five links (either in a list, or as graphical icons) next to one another, and never present more than seven at once. When you need to present more than seven text links, break them up into multiple lists with a separate heading for each five to seven items."
Head, Heart, Hands
Refractal Design: Before
Refractal Design: After