Showing a friendly site; jumping on rich media (?)

9. Make your site user-friendly

While there are yet no hard and fast rules on web page structure, which can restrict the freedom-loving net citizens of the world, site guests have subtle fondness towards certain elements.

Respect the position of the logo on the top right or the left. They have become accustomed with the left vertical margin, and now the right, to contain some form (text or button) of entry to another page or another site. When scrolling to the bottom, clickable text and copyright are all too familiar to everyone. They’ve come to expect some banner ads blinking repeatedly on the top of the home page as if it has a monopoly of that space. They know that underlined text and the cursor changing from an arrow to a hand icon suggest a hypertext or hotspot. These hypertext and hotspots are basic element of interactivity.

Are we seeing the death of creativity? Hardly! Imagine the position of your ears, eyes, nose, hands and legs. Would you want them located somewhere else?

These expectations can vary over time. In fact, a lot of sites have introduced creative uses and designs for frames. Still others have used nested tables with links alongside the body of text for “jumping” from one page or site to another.

For now, give visitors what they expect to find from your site. They will sense a friendly site and encourage return visits.

10. Must you jump into the Multimedia mania?

This is a hotly debated issue. While multimedia or rich media engages your audience in a variety of ways from sounds to jumping text, it does not go easy on the bandwidth, the browser and the search engines.

Despite advances in compression and streaming technologies, the long download time still invites the dreaded “back” or “stop” button click from your visitor, that is, if it does not freeze his browser. When you’ve spent hours and money submitting your web pages to search engines, the situation is even more acute. Search engines misses out indexing the text contents of rich media.

If you must employ multimedia such as Flash, Shockwave or QuickTime for product demos or presentations, provide a link to a separate page. Others use JavaScript to automatically detect the required plug-in and open the multimedia page.