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At 10:42 AM 1/7/98 -0500, Kathy Keith wrote:
>What other ways are there to ensure a website's content is not missed by
non-scrolling surfers? How do you organize the homepage to avoid clutter
but ensure the site's content is fairly represented?

Kathy,

Two possibilities we've used with success on different sites are rotating
content and pull-down menus. 

If you wanted to give any  number of departments equal prominence, you can
use a simple script (either server or client-side depending on your set-up)
to rotate a 'featured department' or whatever to the top of the page, or to
the top of a listing. This rotation can be handled just like an ad - that
is rotated however you want - daily, hourly, every time the page is viewed
etc. The content which is rotated can be anything - text, graphics, or a
combination. This has the added benefit of making the page appear to be
updated more often than it may actually be.

The pull-down menu is widely used - make every significant piece of your
web site a menu option and they will all fit into a nice tidy space - the
'selected' item can be rotated to change if neccessary to change which
department appears in the list.

I also like Jay's redesign of http://www.starnews.com/ - thats probably the
most news, links and advertising I've seen in the top 640x480 of a site,
and it still remains uncluttered. Nice job Jay.

Peter


-----------------------------------------------------------
 Peter Wiggin                      peter@newswebdesign.com
 News Web Design              http://www.newswebdesign.com
 (520) 881 7661
     On-Line Content, Design and Production Strategies
-----------------------------------------------------------

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