1 Corinthians 15:58 - Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

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Spaghetti Junction

Spaghetti Junction - it's easy to get lost.

People don’t like to feel lost so make sure they know where they are on every section of your site – they shouldn’t have to think about it.

show your logo in the same place on each page and make it a link to your home page
give each page a meaningful title - this also helps users find it in their bookmark list
show the site’s structure and highlight the current page
don’t use JavaScript or Flash navigation systems – visitors will be disorientated if they don’t have it installed

Help people find what they need quickly and easily – if they can’t, they’ll leave.

don’t be radical, use conventions that people are familiar with
if you have a lot of pages provide a search box at the top of each page and label it ‘search’
keep links blue and underlined (controversial especially in navigation systems)
don’t underline text that can’t be clicked
don’t create orphan pages – offer people a further place to visit
ensure links work and the information they point to is updated
don’t be ambiguous with section titles, make it obvious where to look for an item

It’s good to know where you’ve been on a site – it’s annoying when you visit the same page 3 times because you didn’t know you’d already seen it.

keep visited links purple and underlined – again controversial
breadcrumbs can be useful for back-tracking to a particular section

Website Design Links

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Jakob Nielson
Jakob Nielsen is a Danish web usability consultant. He writes a fortnightly newsletter, Alertbox, on web design matters and has published several books on the subject of web design.

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Learn how to successfully design your own web page by focusing on the way your end users interact with your content.

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