One reason frequently mentioned in surveys why people are leaving a web site quickly is "Hard to navigate!" So, if you want to make your web site not only "attention getting" but also working for you efficiently, you should use a few tricks to make navigation easier.

For your web site appearing "professionally", the visitor should be accustomed to find the navigational elements always in the same form, at the same place, on all pages. A typical solution to that is a "navigation bar" always e.g. in the upper-left corner on every page. A navigation bar is a string of simple images.

Keeping always with the same images is good not only for communicative appearance but also simply technically. Once they are loaded in the cache of a visitor's browser, they are not loaded again for the following pages. Instead, they are taken from the hard disk (i.e. they are there within milliseconds). This will strengthen the impression of your web site being "virtually instantly" loaded.

Remember that you have no real control over what page it is on which a visitor is entering your site. By search engines, clicking a banner on a foreign web site, following a link in an email, etc. the visitors can happen ANYWHERE upon your site. Still it is of vital importance for you to make them feel in the picture from the first moment on.

A popular image among web site designers is the "parachute test". It goes like this: "If a visitor parachuted straight onto your page, would he know at a glance where in the site he was, and where to go next?"

An easy solution to that is to apparently disable the corresponding link in the navigation bar (but not the IMG tag!). For example, in the home page the HTML code of the navigation bar could be something like

		   <!-- <A href="home.htm">  --->
					    <IMG src="home.gif" ... ></A>
			<A href="page1.htm"><IMG src="page1.gif" ... ></A>
							:
			<A href="page_n.htm"><IMG src="page_n.gif" ... ></A>

See? The part linking to the home page is disabled in the navigation bar of the home page. A visitor can click only on any of the other parts, say, "page1".

The code of the navigation bar of page1 looks like this:

			 <A href="home.htm"><IMG src="home.gif" ... ></A>
		    <!-- <A href="page1.htm">  --->
					    <IMG src="page1.gif" ... ></A> 
							:
		<A href="page_n.htm"><IMG src="page_n.gif" ... ></A>

Now the link to page1 is disabled. And - what I did not see used in another web site so far - the disabled graphic is still displayed yet it is smaller now and not surrounded by a colored border. (This works even when the visitors have is switched off the graphic display of their browser.) So a visitor can see at a glance what page he is at.