Number 9 in a series.

Tell Me The Way To Go Home

The more complex a web site is, the more likely it is that a visitor will get lost at some point. Even in well-organized web sites, simply backtracking on the tree won't necessarily be good enough. You need to provide good navigational links so that the visitor can get to reasonable 'hubs' or 'way stations' quickly. And you always need a link to your home page. It's sort of a 'mega-escape' if your visitor gets completely lost, or if he wants to visit an entirely different branch of your web.

Organizing web sites is sometimes viewed as a bit of a 'black art'. I've found, however, that the simple tree or bush organization is more than adequate for most cases. If you choose to use this organization, then it's best if you provide links to all 'decision points' leading back up to the home page. My Freelance Traveller site, http://www.freelancetraveller.com, illustrates what I mean. If you follow the links through the tree to a specific article, say, one of the games articles (in Kurishdam>Games People Play), you'll find that the article has links back to 'Games People Play', 'Kurishdam', my table-of-contents page, and the home page. This way, you can step back up the tree to any particular level you like. If you use FrontPage as your website manager, the Navigation View allows you to set up the relationship between pages, and it will then use that information to automatically create navigation bars (either at the top or left of your page, and using any 'theme' you may attach to your web), with several options for which links to include on the bars. This method, while convenient, does not offer as much flexibility as setting up the nav links yourself. You make the choice as to what's best for you.