Usability and Navigation: How to Make it Work - It's a good...
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It's a good practice to put additional links to documents outside of your project. Say, if you are selling a book about Beethoven, it will be good to have a link to related documents, like an official Beethoven fan website or an article in Wikipedia. This is a good practice, because Internet is based on linking. Help your visitors to find all the best they may need about information they are looking for, and they will appreciate it.
Think as your customers, help them to find all related information or links to the information they may need on your website, otherwise they will hit a search engine and find your competitor who will have it all. Don't be afraid that if your visitors open a link from your site they won't come back. If they liked your product, and want to do business with you, as soon as they are done reading about Beethoven, they will immediately get back and buy your book. Link! But be moderate; don't let your visitors sink in the ocean of links. 2-3 related links are enough per page.
And one last thing about links to additional resources. You don't have to do it. Do it if you like it, it's a good practice, but be consistent. If you did it on one page of your website, put it as a rule for the whole project. If you don't want to have another headache of linking, just don't.
When it comes to articles, the requirement changes. An article may take a several scroll down clicks space, but if it's too long (more than 5 Word pages), it will make sense to allow a visitor to download it in Word, PDF, or an archive (ZIP, RAR) or at least to break it into blocks and publish smaller blocks on separate HTML files. It will be also good for search engine optimization, because some of search engines like smaller contents.
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