Andrey Vystavkin Blog

Is there anybody who still denies the computerization of the world? The latest results from brandchannel.com proved that those people are the minority, since first positions of the brand’s research are mostly taken by computer companies or the ones which are related to IT market.

As we can see the breakthroughs of Apple Inc. about moving to Intel based processors and San Francisco conference where Steve Jobs released iPhone moved Apple on the leading positions in the society. Youtube which was bought by 1.6 billion dollars and remains the main video exchange source on the Net. Open encyclopaedia Wikipedia won the sympathies of the public. Google? It’s useless to talk about this giant since every blogger ,at least once, wrote about this company or the services they provide.

Finally, the situation cleared up a bit. Due to the lack of updates on the official website of Frederick Institute of Technology (FIT), I had to contact one of the lecturers from Computer Science Department in the main campus of FIT - in Nicosia.

As it appeared, FIT offeres Master programmes for Bachelor students provided by Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh, therefore, if there would be no problems with staying in Cyprus, I’ll be able to proceed with my Master Degree in Cyprus.

According some latest information, the owners of Sealand decided to sell it, and at the same time, famous Pirate Bay
launched the campaign to collect the money and buy themselves this country.

Steve Jobs officially announced Apple’s vision of a phone at the conference in San Francisco.

• Rich HTML Mail
• Normal Web Browsing
• Built-In iPod
• Phone functionalities, of course!

An audience stood up applauding to Apple Inc. new product.

Steve said that by the end of 2007 they are planning to take 1% of Sell Phone market. In my opinion, they’ll take more then this for sure!

Going back to the roots of site architecture, we have to take by default that:

“Every information should be accessible“.

In this case all the navigation should be:

• Be easy to learn.
• Be consistent throughout the website.
• Provide feedback.
• Use the minimum number of clicks to arrive at the next destination.
• Use clear and intuitive labels.
• Support user tasks.
• Have each link be distinct from other links.
• Group navigation into logical units.
• Avoid making the user scroll to get to important navigation or submit buttons.

Tabs

One of classical ways of arranging a good website navigation is - tabbing: logical division of the data among the directories, and subdirectories, would be a comprehensive solution for an end-user. The most viewed tab menus:

(Hewlett-Packard)

(Apple Computer Inc)

These tabs give a clear, logically simple,site navigation so the user will be able to track website architecture, and navigate through the content.

Footer Navigation

With the appearance of sitemaps, or well designed header tab navigation, footer became more less used for storing less important links of the main page.

(Blogging Pro)

Therefore, those “scroll-till-death” sites like Flickr partially duplicate their header links and move them to the footer section.

(Flickr.com)

Summarizing all the examples mentioned, the developer should be very careful on the content aspect of the website, and according to it base its navigation. Some of the basic ideas of Accessibility can be found on Web Accessibility initiative from W3.Org