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Guide to good practices for WWW authors

How will the information be used

Who are your users and how will they want to use your information? Perhaps they are a specialist homogeneous audience who will use the information in a single, defined and predictable way, in which case determining how the information is presented will be relatively straightforward. More commonly though, they will be a mixed bunch and your information will be used in a variety of ways. If this is the case, give some thought to the possible approaches which users may take to the information and as far as possible, attempt to cater for them. Depending on their own objectives and the nature of the information, users may want to:

• get a quick overview
• browse or refer to selections only
• work through all of it systematically
• print it
• search for information on a particular topic

It is probable that you will want to provide for at least a few, or even all, of these requirements. You can represent the same information in a number of different ways to suit different needs. For instance,

• A Web-based tutorial course might also have a table of contents for reference purposes.
• Where a body of information consists of many separate documents, printing can be provided for by making available a composite postscript or text file.

Provide flexibility.

For maximum flexibility, it is good practice to provide links on every page to give the reader access to:

• other parts of your body of information (via the home page or overview of contents)
• the next and previous sections, if the structure is sequential
• a search facility if you provide it
• the opportunity to send comments or questions

Provide navigational aids at all times.

While it is not possible to define a single structural model which will meet all needs and suit all information, one can point to examples which cater for a variety of user approaches.

For instance in the example of the A HREF="http://www.niss.ac.uk/niss/index.html ">NISS Services and developments Web page, there is a brief menu at the start of the document linking to subsections of the same document in which each area is expanded with a number of links. There are links back up to the top of the page at the bottom of each sub-section, and at the bottom of the document there is a standard range of navigation options for this server, e.g.

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