Re: My Viol Consort's Website

[david and ciaran]
You have a "Home" link on each page, which is good. However, it is
at the bottom of the page, and some people might expect to find it
at the top of the page. I'd suggest leaving the row of links at
the bottom of the page where they are, but also turning "The
Teares of the Muses" title near the top of the page into a link
(use CSS to disable the blue text color and underline for that
particular link).

This raises a number of issues. I prefer to have navigation both at
top and bottom, but Margaret finds multiple paths to the same
location extremely annoying. We had a fight over this. However,
there's a major problem with the design, with the border at the top
leaving no place to put the top nav (I guess it could go in a
horizontal row above the top border, but that would be visually
jarring, seems to me).

Margaret needs to get over that dislike. Not everyone thinks the same
way, and forcing all the links to occur only once is requiring
everyone who reads the website to think along the same paths. A
webpage is NOT a book, where there is a single narrative thread
running from sentence to sentence. People assimilate information from
HTML-based pages, with mutiple links, along many different paths.
Your links need to reflect that different style of learning.

If a page is more than three screens long, you certainly need links
top and bottom to other pages. Having to scroll up to the top of the
page to find the links can get downright annoying, and if people have
difficulty getting around your website, they'll get bored or annoyed
and will go do something else, which I assume is NOT what you want to
do to your audience.

This website, I assume, is about showing your consort to the public,
and to sell it - increase audiences. It should be easy to navigate,
so multiple links are the way to go. It is NOT, I assume, about
giving Margaret something that she likes, as if it was a scrapbook on
the shelf. If she likes it, that's a bonus, but her approach to to
reading (any) webpage is not the same as the approach of others.

Philosophically I also am against links that are not visually
obvious as links, i.e., that you have to mouse over to know it's a
link. That said, my own business website violates this, but in a way
that is conventional (graphics in the left-column nav bar) and
everyone knows how to use.

I agree with you. The website is for public consumption, it needs to
be obvious and easy to use.
..

ailuropoda melanoleuca torontonensis
.

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