Navigation Buttons

As most neophyte web designers venture into this tricky land, they usually discover Flaming Text right off the bat and get excited about designing custom navigation buttons and logos/banners.  If you go this route, be sure to work with font sizes and wording ahead of time.  One of the biggest problems we notice is that these homemade buttons end up illegible, sized differently from each other or unprofessionally abbreviated: "Chat W/ Us" rather than "Chat With Us"

You should also be very careful when creating these buttons.  Be sure they complement your site and the background on which they'll be placed.  The goal is to complement, not overpower or become lost. 

Some of the HTML editing programs offer things like FrontPage's Navigation Bar which will automatically update when changes within the websites folders are made.  We don't necessarily recommend this as an option for reasons we'd be happy to discuss with you.

Another problem web designers get themselves into is fancy "mouseover" effects.  This would be when a graphic button is used with white text and a mouse hovering over the graphic changes the text from white to red or blue or some other color.  Graphics are graphics and increase load time.  

Depending on the HTML coding used, there is a tendency for them to be non-functional on certain browsers.  Ash Risen strongly recommends utilizing CSS for all navigation tools rather than pre-packaged navigation tools or added graphics.  The lines look clean and professional.

If you're unwilling or unable to code with CSS, be sure to include "Alt Text" for your graphics.  This ensures that your viewer will know where the link will take them if the graphics don't appear.