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316 Part 4 • the essentials of Design

navigaTion. Is it fun for you to follow links on the Web? The answer is most likely that it
depends. When you discover a website that loads easily, has meaningful links, and allows you
to easily return to the places you want to go back to, chances are you think it is fun. Fun is not
just play; it can be an important part of work, too. Recent research shows that fun can have a
powerful effect on making computer training effective.
If, on the other hand, you can’t decide which button or hot spot to click on, and you are afraid
to choose the wrong one because you might get into the wrong page that takes a long time to load,
navigation is more painful than fun. An example is visiting a software company’s page to find
information about the features of the latest version of a product. You have choices such as prod-
ucts, download, FAQ, and tech support. Which button will lead to the answers you’re looking for?
Make sure you include a navigation bar and links to the home page on every page on the
website. A visitor to the site may have found a particular page using a search engine, and it is
important that the visitor can easily find their way to the home page.
Most importantly, observe the three-clicks rule: Users should be able to move from the
page they are currently on to the page containing the information they want in three clicks of the
mouse button.
proMoTion. Promote your site. Don’t assume that search engines will find you right away.
Submit your site every few months to various search engines. Include keywords, called metatags,
that search engines will use to link search requests to your site. You can find general information
about metatags at searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931. In addition, you can
download free metatag-generating software from www.siteup.com/meta.html and a metatag
builder from vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-metas.html. You can also purchase software
to make this process easier. If you try to use email to promote your site, others will consider it
junk email or spam.
Encourage your readers to bookmark your website. If you link to and suggest that they go
to affiliated websites that feature the “best movie review page in the world” or to the “get music
for free” website, don’t assume that they’ll be coming back to your site in the near future. You
will encourage them to revisit if they bookmark your site (bookmarks are called “favorites” in
Microsoft Internet Explorer). You may add a Click here to bookmark this page link to your
web page to automate the process. You may also want to design a “favicon,” or favorite icon, so
that users can identify your site in their lists of favorites.

Web 2.0 Technologies and Social Media Design
Of increasing importance for an analyst working on organizational websites is the strategic inclu-
sion of Web 2.0 technologies that focus on enabling and facilitating user-generated content and
collaboration via the Web. Familiar types of technologies you should think about including on
both public-facing and internal websites you design include blogs, wikis, links to social networks
on which the company has a presence, and tagging (also called social bookmarking) that provides
useful pointers to online resources such as websites, content on corporate intranets, corporate
documents, or photos that are relevant to the organization and to users. Notice that Web 2.0
technologies can be externally faced to clients, customers, vendors, or suppliers, or internally
faced to corporate intranets.
For outward-facing Web technologies, the reasons for adding these important collaborative
tools to organizational websites are clear. Companies use collaborative tools to communicate
an integrated branding and messaging strategy across multiple platforms, to gauge consumer
opinion, to gather feedback, to create a community of users, and so on. Inward-facing Web tech-
nologies can be useful in building employee relationships, maintaining trust, sharing knowledge,
innovating among employees and groups of employees, locating corporate resources more read-
ily, and nurturing corporate culture and subcultures inside the organization.
Your requirements determination phase informed you about user preferences. As you are
prototyping, you might also want to add Web 2.0 technologies to internal and external web pages
if there is a well-thought-out, strategic reason for doing so. Part of your recommended design
solutions may include adding collaborative tools. From our research and practice with for-profit
and nonprofit organizations attempting to use Web 2.0 technologies, we have found that there are
five aspects an analyst should consider: