Consider navigating your site

Make sure that the navigation is easy to find and follow. People look for navigation in the same places as they go from site to site, but more importantly, they need to find it in the same place as they go from page to page through your site. Are you able to use includes to facilitate changes and insure standardization of the navigation throughout the site?

The old 3 click limit to reach any part of the site is still important. Consider ways to achieve that goal:

• Sitemaps improve usability for your visitors, as well as facilitate the crawling of search engines' spiders. (SEO is beyond the scope of this blog. Lessons on search engine optimization are available through www.gnc-web-creations.com/seo-techniques.htm)


• If your visitors have JavaScript disabled, are they still able to negotiate their way through your site? Be sure to include text links to your pages on each page even if you have a script-driven navigation as your primary technique.


• Time is important to everyone. Consider whether your splash page is necessary or just adding another click and useless wait-time while the page loads. Is all of your target market on high-speed connections?

Navigation is more than links. NC State University lists some wonderful ideas for accessible web design. While many will be familiar to those who have been attempting to design for accessibility, I was surprised by the "skip to content" link. Once I read through the discussion it made a great deal of sense. It is important to remember that text readers, handle code in a linear fashion from the upper left corner of a page across to the upper right, followed by each line left to right until it gets to the lower right corner of the page. The internal link, <a href="#content">skip to content</a>, should be placed at the beginning of the page and the content header would then be marked-up, <a name="content">content header</a>. As a text reader hits the initial link, the option exists to skip over navigation and common layout to reach the important information on the page. Should the visitor decide to use the general navigation, the links at the bottom of the page could be used or the page could be read from the beginning.

Try taking a look at your pages as though they were presented without the graphics. Have you included alt tags with appropriate content to explain what people can't see? I can remember a fellow tech who used the tag to identify the file number of the graphic. This wasn't much help to someone who wasn't familiar with the graphic. Try to imagine a visually impaired friend sitting next to you. How would you describe the graphic? Is it a serene view of a lake at sunset with beautiful pink tones in the sky? Can a gentle breeze be seen in the branches of the trees? Is it data represented as a bar graph? What does the data reveal? If the material requires more than a couple sentences for an explanation, link to a separate page and provide the details that are warranted. At the bottom of the page on the Bobby website, you will find a discussion of the icons for the "d" link and "longdesc" attribute.


copyright © 2004 K.E. Lubrecht
All rights reserved