Since we've all been frantically attempting to complete our sites by wednesday, I am not expecting a huge response to this post. However, thought I'd put it out there since our usability articles and discussions have primarily focused on large-scale sites. I didn't think that I was creating a large scale site initially, but it turns out that I was. Has anyone else's website exploded on them? I am creating a research paper website for my high school students, and although there are many steps to writing a good research paper, I didn't envision it being that complicated. Boy, was I wrong. Keeping in mind usuablity forced me to create many more pages; I felt the need to break information into smaller chunks, thereby forcing me to create more pages and links. More pages and links equals more work. For example, I wanted to let students know what their grades meant: A,B,C,D, and F. Instead of keeping the grade descriptions on the same page, I felt the need to seperate them because in terms of usability, it is much easier to read a single paragraph than five. Anyway, I'm not complaining (ok, I am), but my small scale website grew into a bit of an unruly beast.
Hope everyone is doing well. Good luck.
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While keeping things in manageable chunks is important, it is also necessary to consider how many clicks your user has to make to get to the desired information. I would consider putting all the info on your grading rubric on one page that uses internal navigation-- like "back to the top" links, or maybe putting the info in an inline frame-- which is way easier than it sounds, so they don't feel like they're leaving the page. Try the W3C's iframe stuff (it starts a little confusingly, but gives a good code example that you can experiment with). Here is an example of one on the site I maintain (I didn't create it, so it's a little ugly!). Hope this helps!
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