Web Design Ethiopia

A final piece in understanding how people navigate is to consider the tools the browser provides to users to enable them to navigate.

Here are examples of how browsers may support navigation. The location bar enables users to enter a domain name or extended URL to go directly to a site. People will use this to guess a likely domain name out of the blue (I’m looking for flowers, so I’ll try flowers.com”).

Some beginners regularly confuse this with a search box and will enter their search terms here. Surprisingly, it works more often than you’d expect, contributing to the confusion.

The Back button is used a lot, and sites should remove the button bar only after careful consideration, because this is users’ most common resource when they’ve gone in the wrong direction.

However, users will not always use the Back button, so you need to provide links on every page as well, even f they just go back a page. On the other hand, the Forward button is somewhat less commonly used than the Back button.

Browser-specific buttons take people to specific sites, such as the Home button, Search button, Netscape’s “What’s Related” button, and standard menu items for browser-featured sites.

 Links are displayed by default as blue underlined text. Also, even when links are applied to graphics, the browser provides support for showing the URL of a link in the status bar when the user mouses over the link.

ALT tags and link titles may also appear on mouseovers. Bookmarks/Favorites allow users to revisit favorite pages. The Go menu provides a history of visited sites, allowing users to backtrack to comfortable sports when they get lost.
 

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