Betreft: redraft of WAI home page

Hello,

Personally I prefer a good balance between the number of links and the 
navigational ease of use like there is in the draft. But a large number of links 
can also catch a persons attention.

The latest version of the page gives a good overview over the 
things we have to offer. I think it should attract the attention of a visitor 
within seconds, and it should instantly show what a visitor is looking
for in the form of a link, or else he or she is gone. To attract people deeper 
into our site we should try to find this balance between large linkslists and
generalisation. I am afraid that if we only put less links on the 
homepage that people might think that they cannot find what they are 
looking for (If they know what they are looking for).

What I like about the www.w3.org page is that it looks like you
can find everything there. By showing all the topics on the left, it kind of 
spoke to me saying: STOP, HERE YOU CAN FIND IT ALL. And they even
put Accessibility at the top, which is not as evident as it looks.
But the page has 104 links. And Although it only takes one 8 tabs to 
arrive at accessibility that is probably too much. Maybe a link like 
'skip w3c a to z'? could help.

Therefore I see the advantages of more keywords on the WAI-homepage, 
but also the advantages of keeping it short. I think the current version 
does a good job but might have some more keywords (not necessarily more 
links) on it that people are looking for. Judy probably knows what people 
want to find.

Is it possible to have a list of the keywords people look for at our site. Then 
we can see what they want to find and add that to the homepage.

Kindest regards,

Eric Velleman





>>> Helle_Bjarnø <hbj@visinfo.dk> 08/30 10:49  >>>
I showed the  different drafts to the blind persons I normally work with in
matters of accessibility to the web, both really experts in the area.
Their comments were: to many links and text on the page, they would prefer
if there only were links to the underlying pages:
News, Resources, Participation, About WAI, Search with just a short
explanation about each of this pages telling what kind of information you
will find there. I think William was in favor of this kind of page on our
meeting last Friday. personally I also prefer pages with fewer links. The
latest draft has more than 60 links and it's very difficult to keep track of
what you're looking for and even harder if you have to keep track with 
a screen-reader and speech or Braille display. I think the present WAI home
page has 57 links. It would be very good if we could reduce the number of
links to e.g. 25. I once read in a book on user friendly web design that a
page should not have more than 10 links ( this may be outdated) but I still
think it's a good design rule.

Kind regards
Helle Bjarno
Visual Impairment Knowledge Centre
e-mail: hbj@visinfo.dk 
phone: +45 39 46 01 04, fax: +45 30 61 94 14
mail: Rymarksvej 1, 2900 Hellerup, Denmark.

Received on Wednesday, 30 August 2000 07:12:46 UTC