One of the most important aspects that must be considered while designing a website is the website navigation. The primary objectives behind effective website navigation are to
- get your visitors to stay in your site
- facilitate visitors to easily and quickly find what they are looking for
- entice your visitors to check out the other things offered on your site
Here are some of the basic guidelines you need to follow to design an effective navigation for a website.
While designing the navigation for your site keep the following points in mind:
- Organize Your Links
- Make sure all your links are well organized according to the order of importance.
- The links should be organized and categorized such that the visitors are able to find what they are looking easily and quickly. For e.g., In our website, all our main links are found on the top i.e. our services, products, portfolio, resources etc. while other interesting links are found on the right side of the page. This organization is common and consistent throughout the site.
- Put in related links as visitors coming to a particular page will probably be interested in more information you have under the same topic. For eg, if the web page belongs to a guide such as web design guide, you will find the related links for the same below the right menu and also at the bottom of the page in our website.
- Navigation links should be prominent
Once you have decided on your navigation links, you need to think of the best place to put them.
- Try to design your navigation on the top or on the left as these are the first places our eyes go to.
- Locate the primary links high enough on the page so that they are visible without scrolling.
- Navigation images should be seamlessly integrated into the site design.
- Avoid putting navigation links at the bottom of the page as visitors will need to scroll right down to see the links.
- You may put the important links at the top and bottom of the page to ensure that your visitors do not miss the link.
- Navigation should be clear and consistent
The important links of your website should be present on every page, in the same location, and in the same sequence. Never put your navigation links in different places in different pages as this may confuse your visitors.
- Make your Navigation links Easy To Understand
- Make your navigation links simple to follow and to the point.
- There would not be enough place to have long links, so make use of the space wisely.
- Make sure your links are understandable so that the visitors can know where they will go on clicking on a particular link
- Use DHTML Menus/ navigation menus to organize your links
If you have a large number of links under categories and sub-categories, use navigation menus to organize your links. For this purpose, there are many cut 'n' paste scripts available on the Net that you can use to create great navigation systems. A favorite resource center of the kind is SimplyTheBest.net, where you will find tons of useful navigation menus that are very easy to install on your site.
- Use eye-catching visuals and small chunks of information to draw visitors to click on a link.
- Take a look at other sites to get some ideas on good navigation techniques. You can also take a look at our portfolio to see the clear and consistent navigation we have designed for our clients, which help visitors to find what they want with ease and speed
Keeping these basic points in mind you can go ahead and design an effective navigation system for your site. |
