Improving Religion
on the Internet

Your eMinistry
Resource Site

This series of articles spans the five (5) key areas and will provide you with an excellent overview of the subject matter. An excellent primer for novice Webmasters.

Foundations

Delves into this new discipline - eMinistry - including the planning of your Parish Web site and content creation.

Usability

Creating a user-friendly Parish Web site is key to effectively ministering and evangelizing in cyberspace.

Building

When it's time to start cranking out code, we've got plenty of tips, tricks, advice and places to visit for further help.

Promoting

Promotion and publicity are necessities, even in cyberspace. If you build it, they will not necessarily come...

Improving

And now for the real work: monitoring, maintaining and ideas for improving your Parish Web site.

Services

Various services available from the ParishWebmaster, including our unique new Content Subscription Services!

Navigation:
Minimum Size - Maximum Effectiveness
Part 1 of 2

by Brandon Jubar

Different Strokes...

As was discussed in Designing Web Usability: Site Layout - Part II, it is important to understand the basic premise under which we are operating: The user-friendly Web site offers multiple paths, and an interconnectedness that allows users to flow with their thoughts as they navigate through your site.

When reading content on the Web, most people tend to skim the material, keying in on headlines and bold text. They do not, for the most part, travel through your site in a linear fashion. Our goal than, is to avoid creating an environment where the visitors to your Parish Web site are restricted and feel forced to move through your site in a straight line - page by page.

Creating User-Friendly Navigation

A user-friendly Web site tries to be more intuitive, focusing on how the user thinks. The trick is to provide enough navigation tools without getting too detailed, while at the same time keeping a reasonable balance between navigation and content.

At the ParishWebmaster.com, we advocate three different types of navigation tools, which roughly align with three of the basic personality types (and the combination of the tools takes care of the fourth type).

The Locomotive Style These are people that are very decisive and to the point. The will arrive at your Web site and want to find what they are looking for quickly. These are the visitors that will rely heavily upon your Navigation Bars and Menus. They are also the people that may frequent your Site Map.
The Motivating Style These are the people that are almost happy-go-lucky compared to Locomotives. Motivators think that the essence of life is enjoying the journey, and they love to poke around and explore different things. These are the visitors that will frequently use your Text Body Links to follow thoughts and ideas as they occur.
The Computive Style Like the Locomotive, Computives like to get to the point - but they are not as quick about it. Computives like to do things in a fairly straight-forward, logical manner. When visiting your site, they will tend to go through it in a linear fashion, only moving to a new idea after they have finished with the one they are on. These are the visitors that will often use links that you place at the end of an article. They are also the visitors that will most appreciate links to other useful sites.
The Bridging Style This is the type of person that is easiest to please, because they tend to try to please everyone else. These are the people that will not be overly critical of your site, and will probably come back if they like your content, regardless of how difficult or easy your navigation scheme. By offering multiple ways of moving around your Parish Web site, you will more than satisfy the Bridger who visits.