Web Design - Web Development and Design Foundations with XHTML - page 172

Another design pitfall is designing a site that is too deep. Figure 5.5 shows an example
of this. The interface design “three click rule” says that a Web page visitor should be
able to get from any page on your site to any other page on your site with a maximum
of three hyperlinks. In other words, a visitor who cannot get what they want in three
mouse clicks will begin to feel frustrated and may leave your site. This rule may be very
difficult to satisfy on a large site, but in general, the goal is to organize your site so that
your visitors can easily navigate from page to page within the site structure.
Figure 5.5
This site design
uses a deep
hierarchy
An example of hierarchical organization is the Map Collections area of the Library of
Congress site at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gmdhome.html. A partial site
map is shown in Figure 5.6.
Figure 5.6
Map Collections site
map