I have heard this somewhere a while ago, just wondering if it was true.

Obviously in your navigation you want to to link to your homepage with the hyperlink "index.php", but while you are on your actual homepage, is it best to change that to just link to "#", otherwise it is counted as double-linking or something along those lines lol

Sorry if this is a bit confusing

Craig

linking to the home page can better be done with <a href="/"...

Sorry it was "/", not "#".

But apart from that, is it true lol?

well.. Chances are bigger, yes, 'cause you're linking to the index.php twice. On time from your .htaccess (so the "/") and one time from your menu. For Google those are 2 different pages, so duplicates. I'm not 100% sure if it works like this, but better be safe than sorry, right?

You want to stick to one way of linking to your homepage where you can -- either "/" or "/index.php" and use it uniformly throughout your site.

To answer your question, get rid of the link altogether when you are on the page in question -- set it up so that you have a div or span styled to look like an active link. This is from a usability perspective, if it looks like a link, people will end up clicking it eventually, only to go through a page load or in the case of '#', go to the top of the page. No point even using the <a> tag if its purpose is not being put to use for that particular page.

When viewing a folder in a web browser it defaults to the index page. While the complete list of files can specified in your apache settings folder generally speaking it looks something like this.

index.html, index.htm, index.php, ...

What this means is that if you have an index.html and an index.php file, when you load up domain.com the index.html file will be loaded instead of the index.php.

When you load a home page you will usually need to only specify http://www.domain.com/. If you are trying to obscure your site while you do some testing and have an index.html file in your root directory then you will need to use http://www.domain.com/index.php. Apart from the example here I see no reason why you would need to explicity specify the home page.

Regarding #. I wouldn't use this, it allows you to send a user down a page to a lower element. It doesn't need to be added to home page links.


Regarding home page buttons on home pages. All of my sites have an active home page button on all pages including the home page. Most of sites have inactive navigation links when you visit other pages.

What this means is that if you are at domain.com/ my visitors will still be able to click the home page button. If they are on my about page, the about button will be inactive and users will not be able to click on the 'about' button while on the about page.

I have always done this. I think the user should always know and be able to access the home page, having a logo or header as a link to your home page is such common practice now that it is odd when a site doesn't do it. For this reason my banner, link, logo is always active and pointing to my home page.

As Rakuli said: it's best to remove the link altogether, retaining the text, and style the text to indicate "you are here" (change of colour/background, for example).

In general, avoid linking to the current page; it's bad for usability (there is at least one obscure exception, however).

Right I think i will change to no link at all then as you say, and get rid of the "#".

Out of curiosity, what are the expections?

The main exception I can think of is this: links that have no anchor (and hence no separable link text). For example:



In this case, when you remove the link, you also remove the text. This makes the navigation inconsistent between pages, and very confusing. Instead, I add "[you are here]" to the title attribute: