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Sites dense in navigational anchors yet sparse in content anchors provide access to many parts of the site while confining anchor decisions to a small area. These anchors function more like tables of contents or indices to further overall navigation than to show connections between content (see Adaptive Path [1], Bankrate [3], USA TODAY [65], A List Apart [2], Earthtrends [12], brandchannel [5]).

Organization matters

Some efferent sites, such as Earthtrends, provide a vast amount of information with lists of links. Readers quickly scan the anchors to access the information needed. Earthtrends breaks down each of its 10 major topic areas into 5 possible search modes:

Screenshot used by permission.

This, in turn, produces lists of text-title anchors sorted alphabetically. Kahn and Locutis [93] would see this as an overly dense site--as it would take time to find information. Yet the information available is so vast and the audiences so widely varied, that it would be difficult to find a presentation method using sparse anchors.

Introductions

25 Ways to Close a Photograph [41] consists of one node of anchors that explore one level deep--the facial anchors are the meaning in the work. Yet this work could be considered densely anchored, as the main node has over 30 anchors.