Centurion Website design Tips by Michael Bluejay
Include a way to get back to the home page, on every page.
When users get lost they like to start over from square one. Make it easy for them to do so. If you're including a clickable logo on the top of every page, make sure to also include text that says something like "Home", because some users don't realize that logos take you back to the home page. [Example site]
Also remember that users might not be able to hit the "Back" button to go back to your home page, because they might have entered the middle of your site after clicking a link to it from a search engine or from some other website.
Include a menu on every page.
While you should provide a way for users to get back to your home page quickly, you shouldn't force them to go home before they can go somewhere else. Include a menu on the left or the top of each page. [example of menu at left] [example of menu at top]
Don't put navigation links only at the bottom of pages, because then users will have to scroll down to the bottom to get to them (unless your pages are very short). Users clearly dislike links at the bottom of long pages. On long pages, you'll want navigation elements on BOTH the bottom and the top or left, so that users who have read a lengthy page don't have to scroll back up to get to the menus.
Don't use frames.
You might be tempted to use frames because it makes it easy to have the same header or menus appear throughout the website. And usability studies do show that users find websites with frames "Easy to Comprehend", "Easy to Navigate", and "Easy to Find Info". But there are two serious downsides to frames: First, the address bar doesn't change as you go from page to page. That makes it impossible for anyone to bookmark or link to a specific page in your website, or to share that page with a friend by emailing them the link. Second, when a page within your website other than the frameset shows up in a search engine, a visitor clicking over to that page will see just that subpage without the surrounding frame.
There are clunky Javascript tricks that can overcome these problems, but once you hassle with that to get your frames to work properly then you're defeating the purpose of using frames because you wanted a quick & easy solution in the first place. The preferred way of having the same elements on a page throughout a website is to use server-side includes.
Compress your image files.
Nothing is more annoying to readers than waiting for a 200k graphic to load when it should be only 20k instead. Graphics software can compress files so they take up less room on your disk, and therefore take less time to load into your visitors' browsers. Get some graphics software and shrink those file sizes! GifBot is quick and easy, and shrinks your graphics right on a webpage. Or you can download graphics software: Windows: HVS GifCruncher and JPEG Wizard. Macintosh: GraphicConverter.
And as mentioned earlier, don't bog your site down with auto-playing sound files, either.
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