An award-winning website needs to have valuable content which is well organized. Without good organization, visitors will miss wonderful pages of your site because they don't realize they are there, or get lost several levels inside and not be able to find your site map again.
If you have a collection of articles, it is more convenient for your visitors if they can see a list [table of contents or index] of the articles and then just click on the one that they find interesting or haven't read yet. This is actually also easier to maintain, because when you add a new article, you can put it in its own html file and just add the link to your table of contents. The same idea holds for poetry, short stories, jokes, and almost anything else.
Even if your table of contents isn't on the index.html page, your visitors will still be able to get to a particular article with just a couple of clicks in most cases. Try to organize your website so that almost everything can be reached within three clicks of the index.html page. A large website may need four clicks for a lot of things - but you can make sure the important pages are easily found.
Most people start off with just a few awards and/or a ring on their index.html page. Awards and rings tend to multiply when you aren't looking though, and eventually they cause the index page to load too slowly. At that point [if not sooner] you should create a separate page for your awards and rings - or even several of them. Make sure that your ring page has a link to your index page, and that your index page has a link to the ring page - that way people who surf in via the ring won't get lost.
If you have links to other websites, it is best to have them grouped near the bottom of the page or else on a page by themselves. You want your visitors to stay on your website for a while before they go exploring elsewhere. Some people recommend coding an off-site HTML link so that it opens a new browser, but then there are other people who don't like having new browser windows popping up.
Each page should have a link back to either the index page ["Home"] or a table of contents page. Some websites have a set of navigation links at the bottom or on the side of each page, and others use frames with the navigation links in a bottom or side frame. If your set of navigation links is at the top, then it discourages your visitors from scrolling through the entire page.
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