The Internet is cluttered with designer sites that are visually pleasing at first sight but prove notoriously difficult to navigate. It appears that their developers had visitors' interests last on their mind. Good design and ease of navigation can go hand in hand, and there are a variety of ways to make this happen.

Visual elements -- pictures, text font, size and colour, background images and moving elements -- can be laid out so that a page looks striking. We have already discussed how they can be formatted using tables and blank spaces. It is important for visitors to know what the site is about and where they can find more information on any particular topic.

That is where hyperlinks and navigation bars come in. Hyperlinks are pieces of code buried in the document that let a person move from one part of the site to another, or to another part ofthe same page, by clicking. They are in a different colour from the surrounding text and usually browsers let visitors know where the hyperlinks will lead to when they point to them.Hyperlinks can be part of the running text. For example, if there is a reference to promoters on the opening page in a paragraph, it makes sense to put in a link to the promoters' page from there so that a visitor wanting to find out more about the promoters can do so immediately and then return to the page and continue reading. Essentially, a visitor would click the word `promoters' in the paragraph and navigate to that page. He could then return to the first page by clicking the `back' button on the browser. This is one way of increasing interactivity.

In addition to having hyperlinks buried in text, all pages on a site have navigation bars. These are just a collection of links to all the pages on the site. Click on any of them and you move to that page. Navigation bars are common to all pages and should be placed in the sameplace on each page, unless some design constraint does not allow this. They should also have the same buttons and look, irrespective of the page visited. This means that even if a person is on the home page, the home page button should be visible. Navigation bars act as a sort of beacon and let a person move smoothly from one part of the site to another, without having to read text and find hyperlinks buried with it.

Simple navigation bars have just the names of the different parts of the site mentioned, with links to them. More elaborate ones can have buttons that can be either images or icons that link to the other parts. Yet more elaborate navigation bars have buttons with special effect -- changing colour, changing images, etc -- that link to other pages. Whatever the format used, the destination of the hyperlink should be clear otherwise the purpose is defeated.

Elaborate navigation bars can brighten up a page. Put in images on the bar and the page looks brigther. They are excellent for text heavypages where little formatting is possible. The text on all the buttons should be clear and of the same font family and size; as far as possible, the buttons should also be of the same size. This ensures uniformity.

The navigation bar can appear anywhere on a page -- top, right margin, left margin or bottom. But then it has to remain there no matter which page the person visits. It is easy enough to place a bar on the top or bottom of a page. Tables can be used to place them on the left or right. Alternatively, the developer can use frames to have a uniformly placed, uniform looking navigation bar on the page.

The advantage with frames is that once loaded, they stay put and are common to all the pages. If visitors click on one item on a navigation bar contained in a frame, the corresponding page loads in a new window, or a new frame. The navigation bar remains static in its frame and can be used again. Such a layout allows the frame with the navigation bar to be designed independently of the site and begiven a separate identity.

Ideally, a mix of hyperlinks buried in text on different pages and navigation bars can make a site nice and interactive.

There is another way to increase the navigability of a site. Tell your web developer to add `anchors' on long pages. The main topics mentioned on the page are listed on the top and anchors link to the write up on the respective topic. Visitors can take a look at what is contained on the page as soon as it opens and then go straight to the point they want without having to scroll down to that point. This technique makes long pages look short and works best with text-heavy pages without any pictures.

Almost all the web authoring tools available today allow developers to put in hyperlinks quickly or change them easily. But too many hyperlinks in text can also be irritating and detract from the main purpose of that write up -- telling a point. Therefore, the mixture of hyperlinks navigation bars and anchors should be used carefully in order to let visitors get afeel of the site before moving onto another part. After all, interactivity is the essence of the Web but too much of even a good thing is bad.