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Design Tip:
Avoid Dead End Pages
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Although you may think of your home page as your site's front door, visitors don't always cooperate. Every page in your site with a URL that can be indexed by search engines, bookmarked, or emailed is a potential entry point for visitors, so be sure they all contain links to other pages. Otherwise, stranded visitors may just click away from the site entirely.
Empty The Orphanage
The technical definition of a dead end page is "a page that is linked to by another page in your site, but which has no hyperlinks to other pages in the site." Since it's a page without navigation, visitors can only leave it by using their back button or clicking away from your site entirely. An orphan page is simply a more extreme version of a dead end page. Orphan pages aren't linked to any other pages in the site.
Dead end and orphan pages are often the result of a quick design process or major site overhaul. When multiple pages are under construction simultaneously, it's easy to forget that a changing one page may affect many other pages. When you're making a lot of changes to your site, be sure to update the links on other pages to reflect the changes.
Some HTML editors help you with this: FrontPage offers an Unlinked Files Report that alerts you to files that contain no apparent hyperlinks. NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox can help too: it contains a link checking tool that follows and verifies internal and external hyperlinks.
Both orphan and dead end pages frustrate visitors and deprive you of the opportunity to have them visit other pages in your site. Be diligent about finding them and correcting the problem.
Use Consistent Navigation On Every Page
Experienced Web users usually know what to do when they encounter a dead end page. They click on their browser's back button or look at the page's URL to try and decipher the home page address. But new users may get confused and just leave the site.
Avoid confusion by ensuring that each page contains:
- Basic navigation information: Every page in your site should contain some navigation information, even if it's just a link to your home page.
- Visual cues: Let visitors know where they are. Include your site's name and logo on every page.
- Top and bottom navigation: Place navigation links at the top and bottom of your pages. Visitors may reach the bottom of your page and think they're at a dead end because the navigation is all at the top of the page.
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You're taking a big risk if your navigation structure relies on your visitors' knowledge and skill. Be safe: design pages that any visitor can use and understand.
Have You NOT Been Framed?
With a little effort, you can eliminate dead end and orphan pages from most sites, but they are always a concern on framed sites. Most frame designs include a content frame and a navigation frame. Visitors require both frames to navigate through the site.
However, some search engines don't index framed sites correctly - if at all. The search engine spider would index your site's product information page and offer searchers a link to that page alone - outside the main frame that contains the navigation information. So visitors could read about your wonderful product selection, but that's all. They can't visit any other page in the site.
A simple JavaScript test on every page of your framed site will keep visitors from opening pages outside the frame. The script checks to see if the page is loading as the main window. If so, the script tells the browser to load the frameset instead.
Insert this code in the HEAD section of your document:
<script language=javascript type = "text/javascript">
<!-- Hide script from old browsers
if (top.location == self.location)
{
top.location.href = "yourFramesetName.htm"
}
// End hiding script -->
</script>
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Note that this code will display the pages that load first in the frameset: usually, that's your home page and the navigation page. This may confuse some visitors who were expecting different information, but at least you've given them a way to navigate through the site to find the page they were expecting.
Eliminate dead end and orphan pages from your site to prevent the needless loss of site visitors. Remember to check all your pages for correct links and navigation instructions. That way, whether visitors enter your site through the front door, back door, or side window, they'll never get lost.
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