Keep pages short and focused
If you have a page containing five short essays on various subjects, break it into six pages: one for each essay and one for a linking or index page. Users who want to hear what you have to say about your stint with Billy Graham may well be completely uninterested in your thoughts about the debate on Ordination of Women. But if you put all those essays on a single page, you will need in-page links from the Heading to the section, or users will see parts of essays they didn't expect. That's just bad form. Stay focused.
Most Web servers call up four GIFs (images) at a time, so it's a good idea to limit GIFs to fewer than four per page. By avoiding multiple server calls for GIFs, your pages will load more quickly. Avoid orphaned pages
All of the pages on your site should point to both the home page and to their own parent pages (unless, of course, the home page is the parent page). Pages that act as blind alleys can confuse users. Avoid that. Show the visitors the way home.
The Links
Differentiate visited links from unvisited ones
By default, all Web browsers display visited links in a different color than links the user has yet to visit. You can also differentiate your site and make it usable in lots of other ways. But if your users can't figure out where they've already been and what new territory remains to explore, they may simply get frustrated and leave.
Identify the site on every page
Put your church's name and logo in the upper left corner of every page. (Unless you're designing for a right-to-left language, in which case you should put it in the upper right corner.) It may be a good idea for the name and logo to perform double duty as the home page link.
Closing the page with some farewell items also needs thought. I have used the URL, Email addresses and a summary of my site. I am trying to leave a friendly impression.
Leave bread crumbs
Every page of a well designed site should contain the full path from the home page down to the parent of the current page. This bread crumb approach provides context and lets users travel back up the hierarchy to any level without having to hit all the intermediate points. Yahoo helped popularize this technique, and it's now used on many sites
'New' or 'Under Construction'
There are some very clever icons which contain the words 'New' or 'Under Construction'. Some tempt you to use them (and I know of sites which are still 'New' or 'Under Construction' months after I first found them).
Links that do not work
It is good to have a plan, and the ideas do get into the script. But it is a bit unfair to offer your readers pages which do not exist.
Programmers use <!-- to tell the computer to ignore what follows. The message is ended with the code -->. It took me a long time to discover that the number of - had to be just two (or pairs of two and a space). Spaces can be used to spread the message across the programmer's page.
To avoid the viewer seeing your unfinished bits, I think it is a good idea to enclose the code in the secret signs <!--
ignore this,
and
end with stop ignoring it
--> . |
|