Navigation is probably the single most important piece of a website and if it is not done well, the cascading effects can be disastrous. Navigational menus are not only beneficial for your visitors but search engines and spiders utilize the navigation on your site to create a road map for others within search results.
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Navigation is not limited to just having a pretty menu, it also encompasses handling pages that don’t resolve, maintaining consistency throughout your website and making it easy for your users to find things no matter where they are on your website. (What Makes a Good Website, 2008) Web site navigation should never be complicated. A good menu helps visitors to find information pages easily. A good web page will also have a page menu links to other important web pages. Keeping menus simple on every web page avoids web page navigation confusion.
The main menu options should be limited to 4 or 5 choices on each page, or visitors can easily be overwhelmed with too many choices! A sitemap page and a site index page are usually the most important web pages on a good website. Access keys are also a good web page navigation feature. Pages that allow users to choose the way they display a web page, improve accessibility and makes your site user friendly. (What Makes a Web Page Accessible, 2011) Web Development Tools As web technologies constantly advance, the skills a developer is expected to have are constantly increasing.
Web users are beginning to expect Ajax interfaces, charts and graphs and a whole host of other tricks and features. This means web developers not only have to be skilled with HTML and a server-side programming language such as PHP or Perl, but they now also need to be JavaScript gurus, Flash experts, and skilled graphic designers. (Skirrow, 2010) Some of the web development tools the author will use in the comic book website described in the Week 1 paper would be password validation, image enlarging, progress bars and audio players.
The author believes that these tools described below will make the visitor’s experience on the homepage a fun and unique one. Password validation is important to ensure your users choose passwords that offer an adequate level of security to prevent their accounts from being compromised. Image enlarging scripts, similar to JavaScript light boxes, enable the user to enlarge or zoom in on an image chosen from a set of thumbnail images.
Progress bars are very useful when handling user uploads or pages which can be slow to load; they keep the user informed that progress is being made and that the page is loading. Audio players can be a great way of setting a mood or getting a message across. (Skirrow, 2010) The author believes that the screenshot shown on page 4 is a good example of how he envisions the comic book homepage looking like. The screenshot is the homepage for www. atebits. com. Atebits was a small iPhone software application business.
It was so small that it was just one person. His last blog entry describes how Twitter was so impressed with his work they decided to hire him. No doubt the look and navigation of his website also helped. It has a simple, attractive but yet effective home page design.
