| Tips for church sites - Top - Evangalism Tool |
Page 6 of 8 Navigation and usability60. Good navigation allows a first-time non-technical visitor to move round your site easily.Bad navigation gets visitors quickly lost – probably never to return to the site. 61. Good navigation gives visitors constant clues to fulfill the vital requirements: ‘Where am I, where have I been, and where can I go’. Many websites, of all types, fail to be effective because they lack a good intuitive navigation system. A ‘you are here’ highlighter color or arrow on a navigation menu helps. A bread-crumb trail (showing the relationship of the page to a subject area and the home page) can also be used. The page left-margin is usually a good position for a navigation menu. 62. Do not offer too many links in your navigation menu. Some churches include every page they have in a menu – 20 or more. Too much choice is confusing. Some less important pages do not need to be on the menu anyway. ‘Our history’ or ‘doctrinal statement’ (probably not of initial interest to a non-Christian visitor) should not be part of a main menu. If you have such pages, they should only be links from a second-level page – for instance one called ‘about us’ on the main menu. 63. You can use ‘paper prototyping’ to plan different ways of structuring links within the site. Create sheets of paper, one to represent each page. Then arrange them on a flat surface to represent the links between the different pages. 64. Make sure your pages download quickly. Not everyone has broadband. Slow-loading pages are very irritating. Ensure that graphics are not too large – both in pixel dimensions and file size. Include height and width attributes in the code for graphics: this ensures that the page will format correctly even before all the graphics have downloaded. |
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