Triangular navigation
Users want to go from A to C as quickly as possible.
You plan A to C via B. The user does not care for B. You disallow a direct route from A to C at your peril.
Triangular navigation explained
Fairly and rightly, you
set up your website to provide easy step-by-step links, eg Home - Project index -
Individual project. Sometimes the A-B-C route will work. For some users -
regulars, people with slow connections, people looking for the new stuff, people who
struggle with the technology - it's too long. A-C is better.
A-C also reveals content hidden away on your site.
Triangular navigation encourages A-C and has A-B-C as a fall back. The aim is to let users navigate to important pages directly, and via no more than two links at most.
Risk of not offering A-C
The risk of not
helping users go directly to content is that they leave your site. Maybe never come
back.
Arriving directly at C and when C is really A
Users will enter your site
by going straight to a selected page (via a search engine perhaps), find what they want
(hopefully) and leave. You cannot count on your carefully selected route to a page
being followed at all.
Users will often enter your site at almost but not quite the right destination. What they really want is on another page. This means that every page on your website needs to work as a starting point.