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Designing a Good Navigation System for Your Website
While you should design your website
to be aesthetically pleasing, beautiful graphics and
clever little details are no substitute for a good navigation
system. No matter how great your website looks, it will
be useless if your visitor can't find their way around
your site.
Traditionally the navigation menu is
placed just below the header area or on the left hand
side of the web page. Usability studies have shown that
web site visitors instinctively look in these areas
first.
Wherever you decide to place your navigation
menu, remember that consistency is important. The most
important thing is to place your navigation menu in
the same spot on every one of your web pages. If you
use an image to represent a navigational button, use
the same image and the same color for that image on
each page of your website. For example, if you use an
image of a green house in the left hand corner of your
web page as your "Home" navigational link,
use the same green house image in the left hand corner
of every one of your web pages to designate the "Home"
link.
Your visitor should be able to find
what they are looking for within 3 clicks of your home
page. This is usually not a problem for small sites.
However, if you have a large site with many pages, you
will need to design a navigation menu that provides
access to all areas of your website without getting
your visitor lost or confused.
You may want to use a bread crumb trail
type of navigation system for large sites (Homepage
> Category > Subcategory > Content). Another
option is to use a dynamic menu that changes according
to the page your visitor is, but be aware that search
engines may not be able to spider sites using dynamic
menus.
Usability studies have shown that a
navigation menu should contain no more than 8 links.
The more choices a user is given, the more difficult
it will be for them to make a decision. Also, if you
have many links, your visitor may get the impression
that your site is complicated and difficult to navigate.
If you have only a few links, use mouse
rollovers to visually enhance your website. You will
need to add some Javascript that pre-loads the rollover
images and then add "onMouseover" events to
your image links. Alternatively, use CSS for text rollovers
that change the link color when the mouse cursor hovers
over a link.
Navigation links should be considered
the most important part of your website for two reasons:
1) They are used by your visitor to
find content on your site.
2) They are used by search engines to
spider your site.
The reason users visit your site is
to get information. If visitors can't find the information
they are searching for, they will click away, perhaps
never to return again.
While different search engines have
different rules on how they spider and rank a site,
basically a "bot" or "spider" will
visit a site, search for a "HREF" link and
follow the links to other pages, indexing the pages
as it goes along. If the "bot" or "spider"
doesn't find a "HREF" tag on a page, it is
blocked from going any deeper into the site. As you
can see, you need to design your navigational system
so that a search engine can spider all pages of your
website.
When designing your website, take the
extra time to design a good navigational system. It
is vital to your success!
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