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It's really easy to get lost on any nontrivial site. And when a search engine dumps you into a site, you start out lost.
Many users don't ever scroll down the page (though this is improving). Your first page should have the most important links near the top.
The latest browsers will display a "tool tip" (or "help balloon", for you Mac fans) containing the text of the TITLE attribute. This works for almost any tag, but is most useful for links.
In many cases, that extra information makes it much easier to decide whether a link is worth following. And that Jakob Nielsen guy agrees.
Search engines will drop people in the middle of your site. Make it easy for them to get back to the top. You can put a navigation bar at the top or bottom of your pages (or both), but it needs to be on every page.
For most people, color is an important clue for which links have been visited already. Don't make users learn a new set of colors just for your site; leave the link colors unmodified.
Also, don't use common link colors (blue and red) for text that isn't links.
Document author:
Kevin R. Boyce
(email: Kevin.R.Boyce@gsfc.nasa.gov)
This page was last modified on 23-Dec-97 at 2:36 PM