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Bad Web Design: Navigation Errors

By Richard Lowe

Confusing navigation is another way to keep your visitors from coming back
or even staying very long on their first visit. You must provide a way for
your visitors to find out what you've got - it's of no use if no one sees
it.

Link Every Page To The Home Page - One huge mistake that many webmasters
make is to forget to link every page back to their home page. It's important
to remember that search engines typically spider your entire site. This
means that visitors can land literally anywhere in your site. If you are
smart you will accept this fact and place a link back to the home page.

Java or ActiveX Menus - I know those Java or ActiveX menus look great, but a
large minority of your visitors will not allow these to operate due to
security concerns. In my company I am in charge or security, and one of the
things that we do is turn off the downloading of ActiveX controls from the
internet. Period. We are also very cautious about allowing unknown Java
applets into our organization.

The point is stick to a simple, clean navigation interface. Personally, I
would avoid Java and most especially ActiveX in anything intended for the
internet.

Confusing Menus - You want to make it difficult for your site to succeed?
Then make your navigational system difficult to understand and use. Bury
your hyperlinks in a complex image map that's not obvious to the user.
That's a great way to stop people from looking around your site.
Some other things you can to do prevent users from enjoying your site:

- Scatter your links all over the page haphazardly
- Put your menus only at the bottom of every page
- Make the hyperlinks the same color as the rest of the test
- Make the text very, very small or in a strange font
- Make the menu actually move around the screen (I've run into a couple of
sites with strange floating menus)
- Put the menus on a popup window or console of some kind

No Easy Contact Method - Behind every web site is a person, and behind every
PC is a face. I wonder sometimes about webmasters who make it difficult to
contact them. The larger websites are famous for this - try communicating
with someone at Yahoo, for example.

Just place a link to a contact page on every page of your web site. Make it
obvious and easy to get to. Personally, I prefer using a form instead of an
email link due to the huge number of email spiders which seem to be
appearing all over the web. It doesn't really matter how you do it, just be
sure your visitors have an easy way to get hold of you.

What About Those Without Graphics? - Believe it or not, many people surf the
web without graphics. Just as an experiment, go into your browser and turn
off graphics, then surf for an hour or so. You'll soon understand some
things that you need to do to allow for those people.

Why would anyone not want graphics? Well, it does make surfing much faster,
and some of the older browsers don't support graphics at all. You would be
smart to use ALT tags to make it easier.

This is especially true of image maps - be sure to include ALT tags or
someone who has graphics turned off will just leave your site fast.

Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This
website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet
profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
Web Site Address: http://www.internet-tips.net
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