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Design Tip:
Find Your Way Home
by Tom Dahm,
Chief Operations Officer,
NetMechanic, Inc.
But there are some simple things you can do to improve this situation. For one thing, you should follow Web design conventions wherever possible.
Sometimes the term "Web design convention" sounds like an oxymoron. In the world of desktop software, the major application developers long ago established user interface standards that help people use their software. Though you can quibble about the logic of some of these standards (Does every application really need to have a File and an Edit menu? Do these really have to be the leftmost menus?), their consistency makes life easier for the public.
Unfortunately, few such conventions exist on the Web. The Web is a much more free form environment, and aesthetics seem to be constantly at odds with usability and standardization. It's hard even to get a group of designers to agree on something simple, like where it's ok to use custom colors in your hypertext links.
But one of the few places where a clear convention exists is in the use of the Web site logo as a navigation element. This is something that's simple to do, and has great practical value.
Most Web surfers follow a common browsing pattern: they drill down a path from a site's home page, following interesting links as they go, then return to the home page to start another path.
Unfortunately, poorly designed sites complicate this process by denying an easy path back to the home page. The user has to retrace their steps using the "Back" button again and again.
A well-designed site helps users find their way home. Every navigation bar in such a site has a link back to the site's home page. Even better, the site's logo acts as a link back to the home page, like this:
<A HREF="/"><IMG SRC="logo.gif"></A>
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This convention is nearly universal among commercial Web sites. Name ten commercial sites, visit their pages, and try clicking on their logos. Odds are you'll see this convention followed on every site.
Yet it's surprising how rarely this convention is followed by small Web sites and personal Web pages. We recently reviewed a sample of personal sites tested with NetMechanic. The result? Only about a quarter of the sites followed this rule.
What about your site? If you aren't following this rule, you may want to adopt it as soon as you can. Anything that improves navigation will help keep visitors at your site.
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