This issue's headlines:
Website Spotlight - Mystical Realms
Desert Realm News - Gallery and Compendium
Web Design Tip of the Month: Navigation
Newsletter Info
Helpful Links

Mystical Realms
http://myrealms.net

With a recent redesign of the site, Mystical Realms earned itself the website of the month. Mystical Realms is a play-by-chat role-playing game with strong ties to their forum. The first thing that caught my attention is the quality of graphics displayed throughout the site, and they follow many good web design practices to keep the website easy to use and read.

It has been a while since the last newsletter so there are too many new features to highlight them all. Below are the two biggest enhancements.

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Art and Photography Gallery

The gallery has been up for a few months now. It has served as a place to post my favorite photos and a few friends' artwork. Over the last week, I have greatly enhanced its functionality.

• If you are an artist or photographer, you are now able to upload your own artwork.
  
• You can sort the pictures based on several different things such as the most popular, newest, and in alphabetical order.
  
• There is a forum dedicated to talking about art and photography.
  
• You can promote your own websites by trading links.

There are currently 115 very good pictures, many of which were added in the last week.

The gallery is located at http://www.thelensflare.com and the forum is located at http://www.thelensflare.com/galleryforum

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Compendium

The purpose of the compendium is to provide reference material for fantasy, science fiction, and their mundane counterparts such as medieval history and space. Anybody can contribute by posting information in the forum. Once it has been proofread and approved, it will be posted on the main website.

Navigation is the second most important thing about your website, with the first being your actual content. If both people and search engine bots can't find your pages, then having great content isn't going to do you any good.

Navigation needs to be easy to use and consistent on all of your pages. People want to get to the information they are looking for within the first one to two pages they visit. If they can't find it, they will hit their back button, return to the search engine results page, and go the next link on the list.

When navigation is concerned, your links should be obvious where they are going without having to move the mouse over them. They should also be plain HTML, not JavaScript or Flash. This is because most robots can't read JavaScript, and none that I'm aware of can read a Flash file. If they can't read it, they won't follow the link, and your pages won't show up in their search results. You'll also find that menu systems which force a person to hunt through a hierarchy will result is less pages viewed. This is because people do not want to learn your system. They want to click and go.

Your navigation should also be on every page because most people coming to your website from a search engine will go directly to a content page, not your homepage. Only 2% of Desert Realm's traffic is on the homepage. This means that if you can avoid it, don't use frames, or have a non-frame version of your website. Having navigation on every page does another thing for you; It helps your ranking in certain search engines, such as Google, that care about the number of links back to a certain page.

The Desert Realm Fantasy and Sci-Fi Home Page
http://www.desertrealm.com

Add your website to the search engine and featured link section:
http://www.desertrealm.com/submiturl.php

The Desert Realm Forum (general discussions and PBP RPG)
http://www.desertrealm.com/forum/

Contact Me
http://www.desertrealm.com/contactform.php

To Subscribe or Unsubscribe to this newsletter:
http://www.desertrealm.com/news.php

Art and Photo Gallery
Art and Photography Gallery



Thanks,
Brian B.
The Desert Realm