Designing a Web Site for Your Congregation

Help Users Find Their Way

Design your site so that users can easily navigate through it. Try to create a site where users can form a mental model of the site and its contents. There is much you can do to help foster a sense of the entirety of your site and how to get around in it.

Take Advantage of Keywords
Use the same keywords in a page's title, head, and body text. These elements are indexed by search engines. Search engines rank their results based on the frequency of keywords in each document they find. Therefore, using the same keyword in different parts of your page can increase the likelihood that your page will be found by people looking for that keyword. Meta tags are often used by search engines to get more indexing information for a site.

Provide a Directory of Your Site
If you have more than a few pages, a table of contents page is helpful to the reader. As an example, this page has links to all your pages and shows the relationships of your pages to each other.

Show Users Where They Are
Provide users with a way to know where they are in the context of your site. One way to do this is to highlight the current location in a table of contents that shows the main levels of your site.

Minimize the Need to Scroll and Resize
Fiddling with scroll bars and window size controls takes time and effort. If possible, design your pages so that all information can be viewed within the default window width, which is approximately 460 pixels.

Use Descriptive Titles
Put a descriptive TITLE tag in your HTML code. When users add a bookmark for your page, the title is used as the title of the user's browser window and as the bookmark. Be sure to use a title that tells where the bookmark leads to on every page of your site.

Choose the Appropriate Depth Versus Breadth for Your Site
Create a balanced site structure that allows users to get to the information they are seeking within three clicks. If your site is well structured, users can form a mental model of it that helps them understand the scope of the site.

Use Appropriate Navigation Buttons
If the material you are creating is linear in nature, follow the book metaphor and create a structure that users can navigate by going from one page to the next using Previous and Next buttons. This way users can be sure that they have covered all of the information in the site. For example, if you are creating a site that contains lots of information about a topic, use Previous and Next buttons to aid users in getting through all of the sections without having to go up and down the hierarchy or your site. When the user gets to the end of a sequence of information, either omit a Next button on the page or disable it.

If there is little carry over from one section to another in your site, use buttons that link to your main page or a logical section. For example, if your site provides representations of art in your museum, you could group the pages by era or artist. The user could then navigate through the site in a random order. Each section would link back to the main page. Each page could link back to the section where it is located.

Avoid Dead Ends
Don't create a situation where the only way to leave a page is by using the browser's Back button. Provide Previous, Next, and Top buttons.

Include Internal Links on Long Pages
If a page must be long, use internal links on the page to aid with navigation through its contents. Remember to use relative links so that the browser doesn't reload the page each time a link is selected (full URLs may cause this behavior). If you include a topics list at the top of the page, it's helpful to include links to a table of contents every so often on the page. You can also include a "Go To Top" link at the bottom of the page so that users can easily return to the beginning of the page.

Include Links to the Key Locations in Your Web Site
Consider providing links to the following places in your site to help your users navigate:

Home
Index
Table of contents
Previous page and next page
Other sections (branches of the hierarchy)
Other pages within the section

Duplicate Navigational Items at the Bottom of Your Pages
Most people read from the top of a page to the bottom, so they want to go somewhere else at the end of a page. Therefore you should provide navigation links at the bottom of your pages, particularly if the page scrolls, so that users can easily get from one place to another. Be sure not to include too many links throughout the page.

Be Consistent in the Placement of Navigation Links
If your site has navigation links at the top and at the bottom of one page, include them on all pages throughout your site. Providing navigation links in standard places helps people to develop a perception of stability in your site and makes navigation easier.

Use Cross References
Include a table of contents on your page to cross-reference the pages on the same level of the section. You can also provide links to sources and related items such as abstracts, references cited, and related items of interest. You can include cross-references to topics with a synonym for a name. For example, "For information on windoids, see Utility Windows." You can include cross-references to similar information. For example, "For additional information on elephants, check out African Animals."

Provide a Search Mechanism
If your site is large or complex, help users find what they want by providing a local search mechanism. Doing so mitigates any navigation problems that may arise due to a deep content structure.

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Prepared for Making Christ Known Conference November 22, 1997
Email at webmaster@expertsd.com