The following tips are a guideline to assist you the award applicant to understand what we are looking for specifically. Reading these guidelines will further enhance your understanding of what it will take to win an award. We have included suggestions on what we find desirable and what we find undesirable within a site.
Desirable Elements
User friendly navigation, refers to the ease of which to find everything your site has to offer. You may have the best content on the Internet, however, if we can't locate it all your wonderful efforts are lost. Establish one method of navigation and use that method through the site. It is preferable to keep the tool in the same place on every page. The viewer should be able to smoothly navigate from section to section and from page to page, without missing anything you have to offer.
Be sure to apply the target="_blank" on external links. These links must open a new window.
Opening an internal link in a new window should have an obvious reason. To clarify this point further, it has become increasingly popular to use new window presentation with displays of thumbnail photos and other types of displays. It is encouraged to include a "close window" command when using this technique.
Undesirable Elements
Do not scatter your navigational tool at different places on your page design.
Do not have dead-end pages that force the viewer to use their own "back browser button".
Do not rely solely on Java applet for navigational tool. It is always good to keep in mind that not all viewers have Java-enabled. If this is the case, your whole site is unreachable to that visitor.
