Free-Standing Pages

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The Yale Style Manual stresses the importance of creating free-standing pages.  Authors Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton explain that this is necessary because web pages with hyperlinks, in contrast to pages in a book or other document, allow users to access series of individual pages in the Internet, which may or may not be related.  They suggest including on each page, the title, author, institutional affiliations, and the revision date.  A consistent place to include this information on each page is at the bottom, as a footnote.  This is, of course, in addition to primary and secondary navigation elements.

They also warn against dead-end pages--those with no links to any other local page in the site.  This can be remedied by including navigation bars consistently on each page.  They explain the necessity for this by saying, "Web pages often appear with no preamble: readers often make or follow links directly to subsection pages buried deep in the hierarchy of Web sites. Thus they may never see your Home Page or other introductory information in your site. If your subsection pages do not contain links back up the hierarchy, to the home page or to local menus pages, the reader is essentially locked out of access to the rest of your Web site (Lynch & Horton, 1999)."

Related Topics:
Placement
Organizing Info
Free-Standing Pages

Questions? Comments?  Do I practice what I preach? Contact me at afensie@attbi.com.
Organizing Your Web: A Guide to Creating Intuitive Navigation Structure was created by Anne Fensie for IT522 at Bridgewater State College.
Copyright 2002
Last updated October 03, 2006