I can see how complimentary businesses can offer an overall better experience to customers and businesses alike. But, it would be interesting to explore and know how those companies in direct competition work together living in such proximity. Does it create a sense of community where knowledge share is ubiquitous? Or, does it make them work harder to establish themselves as the thought leaders in a big game of cat and mouse?

So let us take a look at the small things:

Skip to content

This is also sometimes called ‘skip navigation’ and is known throughout the web standards community as an item that should be applied for enabling users with disabilities to skip past the navigation menu to the main content of the page without having to hear the list of links when using a screen reader. Imagine listening to the possible pages you could visit every time you visit a new page on the website? Bored? Yes.

The skip content feature is usually hidden away from the visual website version, possibly deemed as inappropriate for able users or perhaps visually ugly.

However it is useful for able users viewing the website visually. Some websites may make use of horizontal advertising blocks underneath the menu or possibly some kind of Flash movie. This allows the user to navigate past this quickly and easily without having to manually scroll past advertisements and other guff (in the visitors’ eyes). This is one that isn’t always necessary but should be considered more by user interface designers.

Breadcrumb trails

Where you are and what section you are in with a quick glance at how deep into the website you have burrowed yourself. This is what the breadcrumb achieves. The highly effective feature allows visitors to be able to orientate themselves and navigate back through a section with ease. As mentioned before, unless the website has multiple sections with several pages deep within a folder directory a breadcrumb trail is pointless. For juggernaughts packed full of information, missing off a breadcrumb trail feature will leave many visitors bewildered.

Top of page

Website pages can be long and packed full of information. Take a privacy policy or legal page for instance. Plenty of meat there. Once a visitor has been brave enough to read right to the bottom of the page it is only polite to add a nice little button that allows them to jump right to the top of the page again, you know, where the navigation is?

There are also certain documents where there is lots of individual information. Let’s take a facts and questions page for instance. We are viewing lots of individual chunks of information on one page. With a layout like this it is beneficial to make sure there is a ‘top of page’ button after each content block as the visitor is highly unlikely to be sifting through the whole page. They will grab the information that they need, possibly from the middle of the document and then want to go elsewhere. Make it easy for them and allow quick transit to the navigation menu.

Anchor points

Again, we will be taking the previous example of the facts and questions page. Forcing the visitor to sift through all the individual content blocks in order to find the information they’re looking for will prove unfruitful. They just won’t. Provide a block of links towards the top of the page that link to anchor points within the document. This coupled with the ‘top of page’ links creates a usable system. Of course if the page is so gargantuan that you would need anchor points to get around the link block then you should look at bringing in a search query form. See below.

Search query form

Some visitors to a website may want something very niche to your service and something out of the ordinary. Such people will probably not be catered for in the main navigation structure. They may not be catered for at all. Let them search by keywords by providing a search query function. They can then get a list of results from pages that contain that particular keyword of phrase. Alternatively they will not find a result to their query. Clever search queries will supply alternatives or ask the visitor to complete a form suggesting an addition to the website content.

Back button

In addition to the breadcrumb trail, or in some case instead of to simply allow the visitor to navigate their way back to the section home page rather than having to jump through hoops within the navigational structure.