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Re: Fw: source order

for

From: John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility Program
Date: Apr 10, 2008 12:40PM

Ron Stewart wrote:
>
> Let me put in a very real example here, my grandmum has pretty much
> lost her vision and wants to use website "x". What needs to be done
> to the site that allows her to do so. Her visit to a site is going
> to be determined by the number of times she has visited a site. If
> she is well acquainted with the site perhaps she has set a favorite
> to the subsite of her choice but if she has not then how will she
> find what she needs without pressing the tab key a thousand times?
>

I think Ron has made an interesting point here, and one that *may* be
germane to this discussion: frequency.

One of the oldest "rules" in the book is to know your audience - yes, I
know, on the WWW that *can* be anyone - but you have a target audience that
you are seeking to attract, and so start there. If this audience is
anticipated to be a multiple-visit-returning audience, then tucking your nav
block down at the bottom of your source code, with one simple link to that
block ("Go to Site Navigation") at the top of your source code can make a
lot of sense. It brings those users who experience web content in a linear
fashion straight to the "meat"; the down side of course is that for first
time or infrequent users who surf linearly, they need to actually skip down
over the meat to get to the navigation first, but is this a "hardship"?
Depends... on a lot of things - and knowing your audience can help you
determine that answer.

What happens if the key content on your page/site is accessed frequently via
a hand-held device such as a cell phone? Getting to the "meat" then is
probably more important than wading through X number of links to navigate
around.

So while I generally concur with most of the other contributors to this
thread who have suggested that most often placing navigation at the "top" is
an expected convention, it in no means suggests that the other way 'round is
wrong. It is a decisions that you as content creator must make an informed
decision about... Based on your audience and content.

My $0.02 FWIW

JF