it's so simple to get right, and so easy to get wrong...
Good navigation should allow someone who comes into a site on virtually any page to access some form of menu or hierarchical ladder.
This includes pages that are expected to be viewed within a frame.
Why?
Those who use browsers such as Netscape are used to bookmarking specific pages by right-clicking on them with a mouse. If the page selected during this operation is within a frame then it is the specific page and not the page defining the frame that is bookmarked.
Also...
Should a specific page be indexed by a search engine then someone coming from a search engine link will not necessarily come to a page that is within your preferred framset.
search engine phrase highlighting...
All of us have used search engines to find web sites.
Sometimes we follow a link and end up with a massive page of text and find it difficult to find what we are interested in.
How much simpler it would be for your sites users to find the search words they had entered highlighted!
|
There are various things we bear in mind:
- people do not always come to your site the way you expect them to.
- pages that are meant to be in frames aren't always.
- deleting a page from your site does not remove it from every search engine and bookmark collection in the world.
- not every solution is suitable for every site.
The approach we take will vary from site to site
On some we would include a "hierarchical ladder", which for this page would go like:
On others we might ensure there is a menu on every page along with visual cues as to which page/section is currently being viewed:
see the left side menu on this page and header box beneath our logo.
On framed pages we might make a menu appear if it is viewed ouside of the intended frame, or load up into an appropiate frame.
There are different solutions for different circumstances.
|
intro | accessibility | navigation | logos
