There are certain features of a web site that are deemed essential: "home", "about" and "contact us" links for example since nothing puts the intended audience off quicker than a web site that is difficult to navigate. Another question: have you thought about how the web site is structured and how visitors navigate round the web site?

A web site with relatively few pages can simply have one page linking to the next, and to the next, and so on, a bit like turning the pages in a book, until the last page links to the first.

Another way of navigating a small web site is to have each and every page linking to all the other pages, which is difficult to maintain as the web site grows, or for every page to have a standardised navigation bar at the top which links to the other pages, which is difficult to maintain if the navigation bar changes, as every page has to be updated, but it is the easiest to navigate.

A tutorial style structure has a series of pages linked to each other as above, as tutorial headings or chapters perhaps, with, in addition, each heading linking to a series of sub pages which link to each other like pages in the chapter. Navigating back to the top can be difficult unless specific links are added to each and every page.

Larger web sites tend to use a hierarchical structure with standardised navigation bars showing where in the structure the user is and the navigation options at that point. Maintaining this sort of structure is easier as changes only need to be reflected in the one layer of the hierarchy, but is more difficult to create as the structure can be quite complex and needs careful consideration and experimentation before implementation.

Very large web sites, such as a news web site or on-line store, use a content management system (cms) where the data is stored in a database and converted on the fly to html. Navigation is by a mixture of standardised navigation bar and links within pages. The advantage of using cms is that the web server can create different web pages for different devices with different resolutions e.g. a PC will get a different web page compared to a mobile phone. However, navigation should be similar. Next