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Welcome to the half-year anniversary edition of ZooNews! Is it just me, or have the months flown by staggeringly fast?
One of the most crucial things for your Web site visitors
is one of the most basic: navigation. If they can't find
what they're looking for when they come to your site, you'll
no doubt frustrate a lot of people – and very
likely lose business as well.
Here are some tips to keep in mind when planning your Web
site structure and navigation:
- Make information easy to find, with
as few mouse clicks as possible. One credo called the Three-click Rule
suggests that no information in your site should take
more than three clicks to access.
- Make links obvious. Avoid "Mystery
Meat Navigation"
at all costs – it's as unappealing to your visitors as
it sounds! A text-less orange blob – to indicate a link
to a contact page – is an example of this affliction. Also,
I've
said it before,
but it bears repeating: never underline text that is not
clickable. Make sure links stand out by using a different
colour, underlining, or some other obvious distinction.
- Provide a site map. Offer a
page with plain text links outlining the major sections
of your site. This is particularly important for large
sites, such as that of my long-time client the Avenue
Road Arts School, whose site has grown to several hundred
pages over the years.
- If your site consists of many pages, provide
an internal search engine. How much fun is it to click around
a site looking for a key bit of information and not being
able to find it? Not very.
- Provide multiple forms of navigation. Sure,
that funky drop-down menu looks cool and can often be very
handy. But if someone is navigating your site with a PDA
or a screen reader, they will probably not be able to make
their way through your site. The all-important search engines
also will have difficulty indexing your site. (More on
search-engine optimization – aka SEO – in an upcoming
issue...) Providing text links at the bottom of the page,
or at minimum, a site map, will allow all visitors to still
get around your site.
- Finally – and this may be the most obvious point,
but one that seems to be often overlooked – Think
like a user. Try to look at your site as if you're
Joe or Jill Doe, coming to visit your site for the first
time, without knowing anything about your company. Will
the terms you're using to describe the sections of your
site make sense to them? Titling your company profile's
page "Keeping
it Real" may make complete sense to you, but will
visitors know what to find on that page if they see that
in a navigation menu? Whenever possible, before you launch
try to show your site to a group of beta-testers (friends,
family or colleagues) to ensure things make
as much sense to visitors as they do to you.
 This fall Toronto's Avenue Road Arts School decided to
split its quarterly newsletter in two, spinning
off a separate publication called jumpstart to promote
the activities of its sister charitable organization, Arts
for Children of Toronto. To coincide with the launch,
Zoonini put together a
Web version of jumpstart that
was inspired by the basic look-and-feel of the printed
version, but expands beyond its two-colour limitation.
 A
few issues ago I enthused about the resurgence of
low-tech organizing tools like the Hipster PDA. Now comes
the PocketMod,
an ingenious tool combining the very un-techy art of origami
with the latest in Flash technology to create a brilliant,
customizable, agenda/shopping list/calendar/music staff
paper/anything-else-you-want booklet... made from a single
sheet of folded paper. If you're a listoholic like me, I
guarantee you'll be enthralled. And besides, it's a terrific
way to use up sheets of scrap paper. (Big thanks to my friend
and esteemed colleague Gabrielle
Zacek for the PocketMod revelation!)
I also wanted to mention that I'll be moderating a round
table discussion on the benefits of blogs
and email newsletters at an upcoming WENS (Women's Entrepreneurial Networking System)
power lunch this Friday, October 21.
We're taking a break from GeekSpeak this month but will
likely bring it back in future issues. Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.
À la prochaine,
kp
aka Kathryn Presner |
