Web Design For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Organizing and Navigating Web Content

In This Chapter

• Pre-wireframing to establish content zones

• Wireframing to map out content and interaction detail

• Presenting content on the page

• Indicating Flash interaction in wireframe storyboards

• Designing navigation options

The Web is a unique communication tool — it's not like the telephone, TV, books, or marketing brochures. People interact with Web sites differently than with other mediums. They click buttons and links, access drop-down menus, fill out forms, and interact with animation, audio, and video media. For these reasons, to design Web user interfaces that simulate other media is to ignore the advantages of Web technology. Designing a Web site to look and function like a book, for example, is a waste of interactive media's capabilities.

As a budding Web designer, your biggest challenge is to think through the interaction design of each page in your site in a way that maximizes the Web's abilities, presents content on the page in a logical and consistent manner, and allows users to quickly get from one page to the next. In this chapter, you continue in the role of Information Architect and dive from the site map view down into the page-level view. You find out how to create a wireframe diagram for each page that shows its content and interaction plan, and I discuss ideas for navigating from one page to the next. At this stage ...