Flash movies, subtle gradients, iconography. All just dressing up right? The small things. It is all about the small things that make a website stand out from the rest and usually it is these items that get overlooked by the web visitor, taken for granted even. Without them they would soon leave in a frustrated state never to return again. So what are these small things?
Well. The small things are the little buttons that lurk around in specific areas of a website to allow visitors to get around the page, section, interface more easily. Unfortunately many websites will only use a handful of them. The outstanding websites will use all the necessary little buttons. Why do I say necessary? It would be pointless for a mini site to use a breadcrumb trail. So there will always be exceptions.
So let us take a look at the small things:
Skip to content
This is also sometimes called ‘skip navigation’ and is known throughout the web standards community as an item that should be applied for enabling users with disabilities to skip past the navigation menu to the main content of the page without having to hear the list of links when using a screen reader. Imagine listening to the possible pages you could visit every time you visit a new page on the website? Bored? Yes.
The skip content feature is usually hidden away from the visual website version, possibly deemed as inappropriate for able users or perhaps visually ugly.
However it is useful for able users viewing the website visually. Some websites may make use of horizontal advertising blocks underneath the menu or possibly some kind of Flash movie. This allows the user to navigate past this quickly and easily without having to manually scroll past advertisements and other guff (in the visitors’ eyes). This is one that isn’t always necessary but should be considered more by user interface designers.
Breadcrumb trails
Where you are and what section you are in with a quick glance at how deep into the website you have burrowed yourself. This is what the breadcrumb achieves. The highly effective feature allows visitors to be able to orientate themselves and navigate back through a section with ease. As mentioned before, unless the website has multiple sections with several pages deep within a folder directory a breadcrumb trail is pointless. For juggernaughts packed full of information, missing off a breadcrumb trail feature will leave many visitors bewildered.
Top of page
Website pages can be long and packed full of information. Take a privacy policy or legal page for instance. Plenty of meat there. Once a visitor has been brave enough to read right to the bottom of the page it is only polite to add a nice little button that allows them to jump right to the top of the page again, you know, where the navigation is?
There are also certain documents where there is lots of individual information. Let’s take a facts and questions page for instance. We are viewing lots of individual chunks of information on one page. With a layout like this it is beneficial to make sure there is a ‘top of page’ button after each content block as the visitor is highly unlikely to be sifting through the whole page. They will grab the information that they need, possibly from the middle of the document and then want to go elsewhere. Make it easy for them and allow quick transit to the navigation menu.
Anchor points
Again, we will be taking the previous example of the facts and questions page. Forcing the visitor to sift through all the individual content blocks in order to find the information they’re looking for will prove unfruitful. They just won’t. Provide a block of links towards the top of the page that link to anchor points within the document. This coupled with the ‘top of page’ links creates a usable system. Of course if the page is so gargantuan that you would need anchor points to get around the link block then you should look at bringing in a search query form. See below.
Search query form
Some visitors to a website may want something very niche to your service and something out of the ordinary. Such people will probably not be catered for in the main navigation structure. They may not be catered for at all. Let them search by keywords by providing a search query function. They can then get a list of results from pages that contain that particular keyword of phrase. Alternatively they will not find a result to their query. Clever search queries will supply alternatives or ask the visitor to complete a form suggesting an addition to the website content.
Back button
In addition to the breadcrumb trail, or in some case instead of to simply allow the visitor to navigate their way back to the section home page rather than having to jump through hoops within the navigational structure.