The navigation scheme you set up for your web site acts as
its road map so it needs to be clear, structured and intuitive. No matter how
good a site looks or how much useful information it has, if it does not have
sensible navigation it will confuse visitors or drive them away. If a person
has to look hard to find where they need to go, then they quickly lose focus
and that is fatal to your chances of keeping them on site.
Navigation (and page titling and headlines) needs to tell
visitors immediately:
* Where I am
* What is here
* Where I can go next
There are many ways of presenting navigation: down one side
of the screen, along the top and bottom or in a frame. However, think of the
search engines, as well as visitors as most search engines don't like frames or
javascript - which they cannot understand. As search engines need to read the
links to index the site properly and you want good organic listings, javascript is not a good idea and anyway some visitors will have it disabled.
So here are some more 'top tips':
1: It is important to allow instant access to the rest of
your site from anywhere within it. Ideally, you should be able to go to any
page in a maximum of two clicks and one is better. Motto: the less clicks the
better.
2: Use the same navigation scheme and elements on all pages.
Create a common navigational look to ensure that your users can use your site
navigation effectively.
3: Wherever possible, use text navigation. Think about the
trade-off between text and graphics. Text-based navigation works better than
image-based navigation because it enables users to understand the link
destinations in detail. Too many sites have beautiful and fancy images for
navigation that mean nothing to visitors. (Ever been abroad and been confused
by their roadside or 'restroom' images?) Research also shows that 'breadcrumb
trails' positioned under the page title (at eye level and closer to other links
on the page) are used more than breadcrumb trails positioned at the top of the
page.
4: Keep navigation elements (elements meaning different
navigation 'lists') in close proximity and help users to develop a mental model
of your web site.
5: Use the right margin for your web site's main index.
Research shows that users are lazy and click on topics in the right margin more
than topics placed on the left because they are located much closer to the
scroll bar and they don't have to move their mouse so far! This allows users to
quickly move the pointer between the scroll bar and the index items. These
benefits are particularly strong for laptops with that horrid fingertip-based mouse controls.
6: Separate important items from housekeeping links.
Housekeeping links are the things people may need to find from any page but that
don't need to be prominent. For example, Privacy Policy, Site Map, FAQs and
Contact Us can appear in the header or footer of the page
7: Make links easy to find. Don't expect visitors to mouse
over every word on the page to discover if it is a link or not. Links don't
have to be underlined but do make them a different colour so that they stand
out from surrounding body text and add a hover colour to links so that users
can see what they are about to click. Use new windows (pop-ups) sparingly.
Comments