Well Designed Homepage?  .... What does it really take?
By Mikko Aarnio

Designing Entire Site

Unlike other medias, the web designing work is
never finished. Always there's something to
add or something to change. Believe me, always
there is, especially I have a lots of work
to do. Sometimes it could be months that old boring
page, and sometimes it changes twice a week!

Web has great work-in-progress status that opens a lot of creative possibilities, and it also make a much harder to make a compact finished project. It's important that you remember that you don't have to make the entire site at once. You can always add, remove, modify graphics and text and of course update. When you make your site adding one page at a time, I suggest that you keep an eye on the big picture. The results may be a architecture design. If you remember that you have to pay attention on site's organization, use a easy-to-use toolbar and follow rules of style you can make a really good homepage. Those are important ways to ensure that people found that they wanted, no matter how much information you add. Another crucial element is that you keep your audience in your mind. Technology plays a big role too. You have to follow the fashion... No, you don't have to follow fashion if you are aware of those new & neat HTML tricks. Now, let's get to business.

  1. Don't give too many choices at once.
  2. No travelling.

Now, just look these things. What does they really mean? Well, I thought that you would ask that so I explain them to you.

1. Don't give your visitors all choices at once. They could overwhelm and leave, without returning in their minds. It's a good way to create a hierarchy and present only the top level of your site. Of course, there founds more links "inside" of them.

2. Don't make your visitors click through too many successive pages to get from point A to point B. There's a rule too: "You shouldn't have to travel through more than five pages from anywhere to get the information you need". The further your visitors have to travel, the more and more of them you'll lose along the way. So, try to strike a balance between presenting too much information at once (see previous rule), and a relatively flat hierarchy.

When you remember these rules your homepage will be on its way to stars! Next thing what we will do is look about navigation and what kind of navigation tools you can use.

  1. Create a navigation tool.
  2. Repeat the navigation tool's functionality with text links.
  3. Keep navigation tool's file size close to a minimum.

1. That's right! You should create some kind of navigation tool. Most web pages need some kind of navigation tool, do visitors don't have to come back to index page each time they want to change the page. You can use frames or just some kind of image maps. If your site doesn't have many pages it's logical to make some kind of image map. But, if your site has lots of pages you should create a menu with text links; otherwise your image map would be so big that it would load so slow that visitors don't want to wait it.

2. You should always make a text links too, thinking of your visitors who has slow connection or don't load graphics. Also users of text-only browser, such as Lynx, are glad that you have text links too.

3. I only think your visitors. You can make your navigation tool as big as you like, but I suggest that you think your visitors too. Some of them have slow connection or they just can't wait half day that your navigation bar would load. They can anytime click "Home" -button from their browser.

So, are you saying that you have read the whole document to this point? If your answer is yes, then you can click Next.

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