Present Content In User-Friendly Fashion

Keep your homepage navigation simple and clear, and repeat navigational aids (like the main navigation bar) throughout the site on each page consistently. Utilize graphics to clearly identify certain areas of your site.  Use menus to help visitors move to desired material more quickly.

The National Network for Child Care (http://www.nncc.org) features clear navigation with plenty of white space on its homepage:

Prioritize the read-ability of your site. Avoid long stretches of uninterrupted text, small or hard-to-read font, and lightly-colored font. Select a font color with enough contrast to be easily read. Use short paragraphs, bullets and graphical separations, and utilize a sans serif font such as Arial, which is easy to read on the screen. Design for a clean look with enough “white space”; don’t make the site design too busy or dense.

Design shallow link depths to avoid usability problems so that content is no more than one or two clicks from the home page.

Children’s Defense Fund’s (http://www.childrensdefense.org) website has the user click 2 or 3 times to access substantial content:

Flag/describe different types of material to allow visitors to identify the various types of content available on your site and locate the content designed for them.  Alternatively, you can divide your site into sections for different audiences or types of material. 

Zero to Three’s (http://www.zerotothree.org) site is divided into 2 sub-sites, one for parents and one for  professionals:

Utilize photographs to increase the visual appeal of your site and to convey your message and mission. Users generally prefer photographs to other kinds of graphics such as drawings or cartoons; use alternative graphics sparingly and choose them carefully. Intersperse photographs with text to break up long stretches of text, preventing usability problems concerning density.

Talaris Research Institute (http://www.talaris.org) uses photographs to add to the visual appeal of its website:

Convey research-based material in common everyday language. Content should be written in “newspaper style,” with little or no jargon, short sentences and paragraphs, simple vocabulary, and summaries that highlight findings.   Provide links to more detailed/academic material that will enable the interested viewer to go deeper into the topic or findings, maintaining a user-friendly web design.  

Layer material to make content more accessible to your audience.  Provide a short summary for the casual visitor and a lengthier option (full report or article, for example) for those who want more depth.  For those who want more, we recommend two or three additional layers with links from the summary.  The second layer should be about one screen long and offer additional key details.  The third layer should link to more in-depth content such as the full original report/article.

The RAND Corporation’s (http://www.rand.org) site allows the visitor to click on links to view either an abstract (summary) or the entire document:

Child Trend’s (http://www.childtrends.org) site has various layers of information, guiding the user to learn more about a particular topic. For example, the site gives an overview of the topic “Child Well-Being” then provides links to subcategories within that topic: