Engaging Readers, Design Your Way to More Blog Comments
Engaging Readers, Design Your Way to More Blog Comments
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You have probably read the studies that claim on average, 1% of online users actually contribute and create content on a given website. The rest are perfectly happy reading your posts, forming their own opinions, and moving on to the next blog with out ever actually leaving any sort of feedback. This makes sense of course, we don’t always have time to leave our thoughts on blogs, or many times it doesn’t even seem worth the effort. After all you have to formalize your thoughts, actually write them out, review, edit, post, and then monitor for responses.
It actually is a lot more involved than we probably realize.
It is also a lot more important to get this type of reader interaction than we probably realize. The amount of interaction generated through a blog is an easy indicator of it’s success. Not only for the blog owner, but also to other readers. Consider looking at two blogs with similar content, one with an average of 10 – 20 responses where the other only has 1 – 3.
I hate to say it, but most people would subscribe to the blog that is generating more interest and response, even if the content was of similar quality.
How Design Can Encourage More Blog Commenting
When people blog about “design” in regards to websites many times they are primarily referring to the asthetic quality of a site. While the aesthetic quality of a site can have a large impact on how many people put in the effort to comment on a blog, I want to approach the situation at a higher level.
Consider that the definition of design is “to assign in thought or intention; purpose.”
Design is not just making pretty visuals, but to craft your site with specific thought, intention and purpose. So the question then becomes, how can we build the site with the intention of encouraging users to leave comments.
Create an Incentive or Reward
The primary reason anyone is going to leave a comment on a blog is they believe that their will be some pay off that is worth their time to formulate their response, edit it, etc… In most cases it is because they have a feeling about the content to the point where they feel the need to get their thoughts off of their chest, or maybe the author is well known enough where the idea of talking with them would be the reward.
However not all blog posts will have content compelling enough, or an author well known enough to create the incentive and reward with those elements alone.
Highlight Your Commenters
Smart marketers have found that the higher that you can appeal on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the better success you will have reaching your audience. By highlighting those who really participate you are appealing to the need of “esteem.”
You could do this by:
- Making a post about them every once in a while
- Having a top commenters widget
- Use gravitars
Give Your Commenters a Bonus
I have seen great response to giving the top commenters some sort of bonus. Widgets that keep track of who has commented the most make this an easy endeavor to track and monitor.
Some of the more common methods could be:
- Giving the top commenters a dofollow link
- Giving top commenters profile/link on the home page
- Giving top commenters a special design when they do comment, do occasional giveaways, etc…
- Use the dofollow plugin, so high quality commenters can get some SEO value from contributing.
Use Design and Visuals to Engage Users
While I have talked about “design” in terms of designing an experience or functionality, I haven’t addressed the actual visuals of a design and how it can improve the amount of user interaction.
If you pay enough attention to the design and visuals of your comments, you can catch the attention of users and encourage them to leave a comment.
Make Your Comment Area Eye Catching and Interesting
As a users gets closer to the bottom of an article or post, you can bet that they have either scrolled past or lost focus of most of the visual elements on the page. This presents an excellent opportunity to draw their eye to the comment area by just adding a little bit of flair, tension, or contrast to develop some visual interest.
Want to really get some attention? Consider using custom designed form fields (not too custom as to hinder user experience).
Be Suggestive
Suggest that a user leave a comment where ever you can! At the start of the comments create a link to add a comment. You could even go so far as adding a “reply” button/link at every comment in the list.
Additionally this will make it easy to comment, as users won’t have to hunt for the add comment link.
Highlight the Commenters
People leave comments because they want people to read their opinion (even if it is just the author). Make sure that the users name/link has enough visual emphasis. This will help establish that the commenter will get the recognition that they are seaking.
Again, use Gravitars. Users who have gone so far as creating a gravitar will appreciate being able to show their branding on another blog and are more likely to comment because of it.
Any Experiences or Tips?
These are some of the best methods I have come across, if you have any experiences, tips, or other ideas on how to encourage more users to participate through the design of your blog/website feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.
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- There is not enough attention in making them usable. This could be poor validation, improper labeling of required fields, making them too long or poor form layout.
- There is not enough attention to what information is asked from the user.
- The Web Content Style Guide: The Essential Reference for Online Writers, Editors and Managers
- Quality Web Content
- Related pages / articles / posts
- Links to rich media
- Latest news / updates
- Previously viewed pages
- A contact form
- Ways to save / share the page
- Newsletter sign up
- Turning off unnecessary items such as the header, footer, navigation, search box etc…
- Changing the font to serif, increase the font size and space out the line height to make the print version more legible
- Adjust the columns or remove sidebars so that only the primary content prints out
- Are users leaving a specific page more than others? Maybe they are not finding what they are looking for and that page can bet altered
- Do you have a page where a lot of people are entering the site other than the homepage? You need to start thinking of those pages as landing pages
- Are there important pages that don’t get a lot of traffic? Figure out how you can make those pages more prominent
- You want to offer a “stylish” low-contrast and an easy-to-read high-contrast version of your site.
- You have many low-vision readers and want to give them easy access to a customized stylesheet with a larger typeface.
- Your site is schizophrenic and you want to be able to change the look quickly.
- Show the user where they can go, and
- Show the user where they currently are.
- You plan to bombard the user with fancy effects. It will cause the viewer to suffer from migraines.
- Your website can live without it
- Your target audience consists of elderly or disabled people.
- You are working on a login page. AJAX will essentially renders password managers useless.
- You need specific pages or content to be bookmarkable.
- Your users need to use the browser’s back button or history feature.
- You plan to use it on a web based application.
- You plan to add support for non JavaScript-enabled browsers.
- Your target audience consists of tech savvy users.
- You are creating a tool or a widget that will be used on another site.
- You need to conserve bandwidth – AJAX allows you to refresh specific content without having to load the entire page.
- Certain tasks will be finished much faster with AJAX.
- Where am I?
- Where can I go?
- Where have I been?
Five commonly neglected parts of a website that deserve detail
There are some great websites out there. They are well planned, well executed, well designed and simply effective. For every great website there are three that are could be great, but fall short due to a few small areas of neglect.
We as a community and as an industry have become very good at most aspects of building websites. Just looking through a few CSS Galleries clearly shows the quality of design that is being produced and how much it has improved in just a few years. If you look a layer deeper and view the source of these websites you will see beautiful and semantic XHTML/CSS. It seems the days of table based layouts is finally gone.
The amount of functionality and rich experience that sites have now day are creative, impressive and engaging. Powerful javascript libraries such as jQuery, MooTools and prototype make it easy to produce these experiences rapidly and effortlessly.
But a website is more than the design, code and effects/functionality. Sometimes we have to rethink our approach and find out what is really important. What are the sites objectives and what are our users objectives? More often than not you will find that you could improve the following areas of your websites:
1. Web forms
While they are far from the sexiest part of web design, web forms are arguably one of the most important. In almost all cases a web form also functions as a conversion point (a point where a user performs an action that accomplishes a site objective).
Here a user is going to enter in some of their personal information so that they can get something in return. This establishes interest and provides the site owner with some valuable information.
Web forms are often neglected in two ways:
You have a real opportunity to learn more about the people who use your website. That information can not only help you build a better website but also a better business. This marketing information could easily lead to R&D improvements and better products.
Do some research and learn how you can make more effective forms. Your clients, bosses and website owners will thank you many times over.
Resources
2. The Content
Content is king. In a recent study 25% of users noted that the number one reason they were to leave a website was due to “weak web copy.” The only reason anyone ever goes to any website is because of the content, yet so many website owners neglect the content. Despite it’s importance content becomes an afterthought. Appearance, search rankings and conversions tend to be the focal point of most web design projects. What we may forget is that with out great content you still have a poor appearance, you won’t rank high and no one will convert.
Rather than trying to write all of the content yourself, hire someone. It will be worth it, I promise you. If nothing else write the bulk of the copy and hire someone to make it consistent with the proper voice and tone.
Resources
3. The Footer
With a little thought it becomes painfully obvious, most website footers are absolutely useless. A user takes the time and effort to read (or scan) through an entire page, and when they reach the bottom they are rewarded with links that don’t fit anywhere else, a copyright notice and maybe an address and phone number.
The point where page content ends is a very high action zone. That means that users who get to that point have a high probability of clicking on any link that comes below it. Rather than some meaningless legal links and an address create a footer that gives the user a place to find additional content that may interest them.
This could be:
Resources
4. The Print Version
Many designers fail to realize how many people still prefer to print off websites rather than try and read them on screen. There are two significant benefits to paying attention to the print version.
The most obvious benefit is that it can improve the user experience of the site. Users who visit your site and print it out will actually read the content and are more likely to revisit the site and make an action (or conversion). If the printed version is difficult to read and work with they are highly likely to simply recycle the paper and forget they ever visited your site in the first place.
The second benefit is it could be a real competitive advantage. If a user prints off two web sites, and yours clearly has more attention to detail in the print version, they are much more likely to use your product/services over the competitors.
You can improve the print version simply by:
Resources
5. Analytics
How users behave and use a website is one of the most important factors you could possibly focus on. Despite this fact it is so commonly neglected by both website owners and website designers. Businesses need to spend more money on the analysis of user behavior and web design companies need to promote the service more heavily.
Even a website that is built using an effective strategy, user testing and best practices is a best guess at what will be most effective.
If you actually pay attention to how users behave and analyize that behavior you can discover countless ways to continually improve your website.
Resources
Don’t forget about :active
Every once in a while I remember some functionality of CSS that we have had access too for ages yet is rarely taken advantage of in creative ways. The last time I really wrote about this is when I had discovered a way to make other menu items change when you hovered on just one of them, as you can see here in the Advanced CSS Menu Trick article.
Sometimes rediscovering these capabilities are valuable for creating new ways to add creative touches, such as the parallax scrolling effect. Other times they can greatly improve the usability and user experience of our sites. In some cases they do both.
I was recently reading through “The Elements of User Experience
,” which opens with a compelling story describing why things going wrong in your day could be the fault of poor design in regards to usability. Interestingly enough one of the points covered in this section is the use of feedback as a way to notify a user that something has occurred.
Most Web Designers Fail to Take Advantage of :active
In the case in the book they mention a coffee pot beeping so you know that it was switched on. This same principal of offering a user basic feedback applies to the web, yet we rarely see it used in all instances it can.
We have had the ability to style a links :active pseudo selector since CSS1, yet when was the last time you actually used it? I will admit that I am a grand offender as well, as I couldn’t tell you. However the value of such a subtle detail can have large benefits to a users experience of the site. Not to mention it does give another avenue to enrich the interactivity of our interfaces.
An Common Example
If you have ever done any usability studies you will have probably run into a situation where things that seem incredibly simple end up taking significant amount of time. One of the most basic of these situations is that of clicking on a simple link. I have many times in my “behavior observing” career seen a user who thinks they have click on a link, despite having missed it slightly.
What follows is a long pause while they wait for the page to change, before getting frustrated and either blaming the internet, the site, or swirling the mouse to ensure the computer hasn’t locked up.
This could all be solved by simply giving the user feedback when a button is clicked. Interestingly enough flash based websites have done a better job through out history of accomplishing this than most HTML sites, done so by adding a subtle “clicking” noise as a link is clicked.
Of course I am not advocating the use of sound (as it fails on several accessibility levels among other issues), however it wouldn’t be hard to give the user some feedback to let them know the link was successfully clicked on.
What We Can Do
By using the :active selector in CSS we can give the user some feedback that a link has in fact been clicked. This way if there is any sort of delay the user knows that it is successful loading and they don’t have to reclick the link. This will make the site more usable and as more developers and designers begin to adopt this process the web itself will become more usable.
Additionally it opens up a new area for us designers to work our creativity. We can now think about what subtle design elements we can give links and buttons to indicate to the user that they have been clicked. In my example, a beveled button appears to be pushed inward.
It Isn’t Perfect
Despite the fact that it is a dramatic improvement over not having any feedback and it does give us more room to express our creativity, the functionality isn’t perfect. You may notice in the demo that if you click on a button quickly it changes so fast you might not even notice. You may not realize that there is even an effect giving you feedback.
Regardless, using :active will still enhance the user experience. Even if only 10% of your users notice it is worth the time and effort put into it. Additionally users who are less familiar with computers and the internet will be more likely to hold the mouse button down longer and thus notice the effect.
Consider Adopting it as a Regular Practice
I really advocate the adoption of it as normal standards based markup. If it becomes a convention than users will expect some sort of notification that a link was clicked and even it happens to fast on the pages that load right away, they know to look for it.
A Simple jQuery Stylesheet Switcher
There are lots of reasons you might want to offer your users more than one CSS file for your website:
Whatever the reason, it’s amazingly easy to create a function that swaps between multiple stylesheets using jQuery.
The first step of course is to build several different CSS files, which we’ll then swap between. Once that is done, we can dive into the XHTML and jQuery that makes the magic happen.
The XHTML
First, we need to create a set of links that will allow the user to swap between CSS files. You can make this as simple or as fancy as you’d like. For the sake of brevity, my links are simple:
<ul id="nav"> <li><a href="#" rel="/path/to/style1.css">Default CSS</a></li> <li><a href="#" rel="/path/to/style2.css">Larger Text</a></li> <li><a href="#" rel="/path/to/style3.css">Something Different</a></li> </ul>
Here I have three links, each with a “rel” attribute indicating which CSS file the link will load. Technically, I could have just as easily put this information in the “href” attribute, but I didn’t want to for one specific reason: if the user has JavaScript disabled and the CSS file is listed in the href, then clicking the link will send the user to the CSS file directly (not loading it like we intended). But our way, if JS is disabled, the user gets nothing at all: which is certainly preferable to the less savory alternative.
The jQuery
Like I promised, the jQuery is really simple:
$(document).ready(function() {
$("#nav li a").click(function() {
$("link").attr("href",$(this).attr('rel'));
return false;
});
});
This function waits until the document is loaded (generally an important step when interacting with the DOM), then attaches a click function to each of our nav anchors. The function basically says, “when someone clicks on this link, replace the link (stylesheet) tag’s href attribute with the contents of this link’s rel attribute.” The “return false” at the end just stops the browser from trying to follow the link.
Of course, you might have to get more detailed if you have more than one link tag, for example, but that’s easily done by giving the link tag a class (”changeme,” for argument’s sake), and writing something like this:
$("link.changeme").attr("href",$(this).attr('rel'));
And while this stylesheet switcher is already complete, we might want to give it some memory: after all, your users might get annoyed if they have to switch their styles back to their preferences every time they visit your site. For that, we’ll need to set a cookie. And to make that easier, I’ll use the jQuery cookie plugin (which I’ve talked about previously when building a popout ad).
With the plugin loaded, we can modify our jQuery thusly:
$(document).ready(function() {
if($.cookie("css")) {
$("link").attr("href",$.cookie("css"));
}
$("#nav li a").click(function() {
$("link").attr("href",$(this).attr('rel'));
$.cookie("css",$(this).attr('rel'), {expires: 365, path: '/'});
return false;
});
});
Now we have two statements. The first one checks as soon as the page is done loading to see if a cookie called “css” has been set. If so, it sets the stylesheet to be the one indicated in that cookie. Otherwise, it does nothing.
Our click function is much the same, except after we set the stylesheet, we also set a cookie. This cookie doesn’t expire for an entire year (and each time the user changes their stylesheet preferences, it would reset this timer), giving them a good 365 of CSS bliss.
Fine Tuning
There is one minor annoyance with this stylesheet switcher: there’s generally a flash of the “default” CSS when the user loads the page. That’s because the script waits until the document is “ready” before switching the link’s href. There is a way around this: moving the first “if” statement outside of the document ready function, like so:
if($.cookie("css")) {
$("link").attr("href",$.cookie("css"));
}
$(document).ready(function() {
$("#nav li a").click(function() {
$("link").attr("href",$(this).attr('rel'));
$.cookie("css",$(this).attr('rel'), {expires: 365, path: '/'});
return false;
});
});
Generally speaking, you don’t want to run any jQuery until your document is ready. However, so long as your jQuery comes after your link tag in your document structure, like shown below, this shouldn’t be a major concern:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style1.css" /> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="jquery.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="jquery.cookie.js"></script> <script>... your jQuery goes here...</script>
This means your jQuery will run before the document is done loading, and thus your link tag’s href will be swapped before your CSS has been applied. As I said before, it’s generally a bad idea to manipulate the DOM before document ready, but because we know the exact tag we want to manipulate and can place our jQuery below it in the DOM, we should be safe in this one specific instance.
Here’s an example if you would like to see this technique in action.
ClickTale: Watch what your visitors are doing
Analytic services provide valuable stats to web site owners and can be the only way of determining if a design is really working or not with real users. ClickTale hopes to up the ante by recording user actions so you can see every mouse movement, every click, and every scroll. Then the service lets you, the owner, see exactly what the user did. Perfect for testing usability. Currently ClickTale is a closed beta but you can sign up for updates by email. A web 2.0 site that is plum purple? I like it.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | CommentsUsing JavaScript to Style Active Navigation Elements

I’m all about efficiency when I’m writing web code. Any time I find myself writing the same functionality more than once or twice, I try to consider whether my repeated code could be wrapped into a function of some sort.
Navigation is often one of those areas where I try to improve my efficiency. I like my navigation elements to pull double duty. I want them to:
In other words, I want some sort of visual indication in my navigation that shows my user which section of my site they’re in. You can see this on the CSS Newbie site: if you click on the TOC (Table of Contents) link in the bar at the top of the page, you’ll see that link gets special styling when the table of content loads.
Now, I could manually set this on every page using a CSS class. But that’s inefficient — depending on the size of my site, I could end up writing dozens or hundreds of lines of one-off code. And why go to all that work, when you could just wrap it all up into a nice JavaScript function?
First, I’ll explain the logic behind my functions — because they won’t work equally well for every site. Then I’ll walk you through a few examples of the code that makes it all happen.
The Logic
All of my functions assume a very clean, straightforward directory structure. For example, if you have an About section, a Blog section, and a Contact section on your site, a logical directory structure might be:
/ /about/ /blog/ /contact/
And if you had several blog entries inside your blog directory, your structure might grow like this:
/ /about/ /blog/ /blog/post-one/ /blog/post-two/ /blog/post-three/ /contact/
And therefore, a function could logically assume that anything inside the blog directory should be considered a part of the blog section of your site, and mark the blog link as active for those pages. This makes our job a lot easier. And luckily, most CMS platforms make this sort of directory structure pretty easy to create.
The functions also assume that you have either a fairly shallow directory structure, or that you’re not linking to too many similarly nested directories. What I mean by this is, if you have this sort of a structure:
/ /contact/ /contact/me/ /contact/me/here/
And you wanted to link to both /contact/ and /contact/me/here/ in your navigation bar, you might run into problems distinguishing between the two. There are ways to increase precision, but they come at the cost of flexibility.
But enough of that. Let’s get to the good stuff!
A JavaScript Solution
I’ve written about this method before, when I previously talked about building intelligent navigation bars. This technique is nice because it doesn’t rely on any JS frameworks, so you can add it to older sites without needing jQuery or the like. The basic function looks like this:
function setActive() {
aObj = document.getElementById('nav').getElementsByTagName('a');
for(i=0;i<aObj.length;i++) {
if(document.location.href.indexOf(aObj[i].href)>=0) {
aObj[i].className='active';
}
}
}
This function looks for an element with an id of “nav” (presumably your navigation bar), then looks at each of the anchor tags inside it. It then compares the anchor tag’s href tag with the page’s URL. If the href tag is contained within the URL anywhere, it gives that link a class of “active,” which I can then style specially in my CSS.
As an example of what I mean by all that, if I had an anchor tag in my navigation bar that linked to “/blog/” and the page I was on was “/blog/this-is-a-post.html”, my blog link would be styled as active, because “/blog/” is contained within “/blog/this-is-a-post.html”.
As a final note, you wouldn’t want to call this function until the page was finished loading: if you call it too soon, your links won’t exist yet! So you can either call it at the very end of your document, or dynamically call it when your page is done loading, with something like this:
window.onload = setActive;
A jQuery Solution
If you are already loading a framework like jQuery (like I do on almost every site I work on these days), this sort of functionality could be written even more succinctly. And like I said earlier, I’m a sucker for efficiency. Here’s a jQuery solution that does essentially the same thing in a much smaller space:
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#nav a[href^="/' + location.pathname.split("/")[1] + '"]').addClass('active');
});
This function is making use of both native JavaScript and jQuery tricks to reach a whole new level of brevity. First, the whole thing is wrapped in a “document ready” function, which means it won’t fire until the page is loaded and our links are in place. Next, we’re looking for anchor tags inside our “nav” ID. And really, we’re looking for a very specific anchor tag: one whose href starts with (^=) a slash, followed by a part of our page’s location (location.pathname). Specifically, we’re looking for the first directory in our page’s URL.
We’re doing this by making use of the JavaScript split() method, which lets us take any string (for example, “/blog/this-is-a-post.html”) and break it into an array based on a substring (in our case, the forward slash). If you’re familiar with PHP, it’s similar to the explode() function. In our example, we’d end up with a three-part array that looked like this:
["","blog","this-is-a-post.html"]
Which means that if we look at the second value of our array (arrays start counting at zero, so [1] is the second value), that should give our first-level directory (”blog”, in our example). This lets us match any subsequent child directories with our parent in the navigation bar.
Tweaking for Home Links
Our jQuery function works great in most scenarios, but it fails if you have a “home” link where you’re just pointing to the root directory, like this:
<a href="/">Home</a>
And because I tend to have a link like that, I needed a workaround. Here’s a way to get around that with just a little more code to account for our special case:
$(document).ready(function() {
if(location.pathname != "/") {
$('#nav a[href^="/' + location.pathname.split("/")[1] + '"]').addClass('active');
} else $('#nav a:eq(0)').addClass('active');
});
Here, we’re checking to see if we’re in the root directory. If so, we’re skipping the loop through our anchor tags and just making a specific anchor tag active. In this case, I’m giving the active class to the first anchor in our list (which is the most common location for a home link).
And that’s that. If you know of even more efficient or fool-proof ways to accomplish this task, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section. Or if you’re skilled in a framework other than jQuery, feel free to share the equivalent code!
Note: I apologize for the long gap between articles. I had some problems while rebuilding my PC (DOA motherboard) and was without my computer for several weeks.
Custom Scrollbar Using CSS in Flex | Axelology
Creating a custom scrollbar in flex … 5 users commented in ” Custom Scroll Bar Using CSS ” Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback …6 Reasons Not To Use AJAX … And 6 Reasons Why You Should
Having to go through tons of sumbmissions for the CSS Vault Gallery over the past few years, I have noticed a definite increase in the amount of sites that use AJAX or some form of JavaScript. There seems to be a trend where even simple 5-page websites use JavaScript to some extent, in an attempt to generate additional interest on the viewer. Sometimes they are entirely unnecessary, and there are cases when the presence of AJAX only serves to annoy or encumber the user.
AJAX technology must then be used only when necessary. I have come up with a list of reasons for this purpose.
DO NOT USE AJAX when …
DO USE AJAX when …
CodeToad – Creating CSS Buttons.
The Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) definition provides several so … User Comments on ‘Creating CSS Buttons’ Wow, 389 views and not a single comment or rating. …How does your design approach affect accessibility?
In an article entitled “Visual vs. Structural,” Tommy Olsson compares the two most typical – and often competing – web design approaches: visual design and structural design. The balanced and well-written article makes the point that while there are often no major differences in the code produced from one design approach or another, using a structural approach can result in more accessible sites. While I hesitate to use such loaded words as “better,” I definitely agree that structural design can contribute to a product that is more scalable, easier to maintain, and more accessible. (I say this from the perspective of someone who has employed both approaches at one time or another.) And remember, “accessibility” doesn’t just mean “blind people.” As the web moves away from being confined to the desktop computer, accessibility is as much about accommodating mobile technologies as it is about making sure content is available to disabled users.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Three timeless navigation tips
It’s 2006, and we’re still talking about site navigation? Yes, we are; and apparently we need all the reminders we can get, since so few sites seem to get it right. (Including, I’m well aware, CSS Insider. Don’t hate; I didn’t design it.)In his new A List Apart article (“Where Am I?”), Derek Powazek slaps us upside the head, again, with the cardinal rules of web site navigation. From any page on a site, a user should be able to easily answer these three questions:
Derek provides visual examples of great site navigation. Put your site to the test! Do you know where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going?Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
