The Website Development Process

Step 3: Navigation

All too often websites are created with heirarchical structures (topic > subtopic > subtopic, etc.) and that can lead to awkward navigation. A visitor on a site that is organized in this way may have to "tunnel down" through multiple layers on the website to find relevant information, then"tunnel up" to the index page again before"tunneling down" again in a search for the next topic.

A much better approach - and the one used almost exclusively at Tanapics - is to use a "webbed" structure, which gives visitors easy access to virtually every part of your website through the use of drop-down or slide-out navigation on each page. Javascript navigation comes in a wide variety of designs and colours, and, if you decide to add or delete features on you site in the future, changes to the navigation for the entire site can be made by modifying as few as two files.

While we highly recommend the use of this style of navigation, it only works on reasonably recent browsers (those released in the last four years). If, for some reason, you expect to get a substantial amount of traffic from people using older computers with very old software, or, if you want to make your site fully accessible to visually handicapped persons who use text readers to surf the 'Net, we can supplement your Javascript navigation with text links, like those that appear at the bottom of this page.



>>> Step 4: Content Development