Web Navigation
Website Navigation Tips
Website navigation or links placement plays a big role in determining the stickiness factor of your website, that is, how long your visitor stays and explores your site. Ask yourself this, What do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them. Its crucial for your users to find what they are looking for within 2 clicks at the most. This is irrespective of what your website is about - be it products, services or providing information. Read On!
Why give importance to Layout and Navigation?
A clean layout and neat navigation and using a lot of white space for your site enhances its looks. Try to keep the focus on your content. That is why we recommend using dreamweaver templates for your site - all pages or a group of pages have one basic design and only the content varies - this way even if your site is a little distracting due to necessary effects, your design is noted once (hopefully with a appreciative eye :-) and then the visitor focused on the content automatically.
If you are a beginner-to-intermediate level designer we suggest that you read our articles on Design Concepts, Design Basics and Web Design Tips before you start designing your site.
Navigation Design Tips
Here are a few important tips for website navigation design:
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Prepare your site navigation before designing to prevent cluttering up the site with forgotten links.
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A clean-cut, uniform and logical navigation system is a must.
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If you have too many links then you should use drop-down menus or flyouts for your main topics. If you have Fireworks create your drop-down menu navigation during the design stage or Dreamweaver then use the drop-down menus behavior are one of their most popular in-built "Behaviors".
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Maintain a site map or section contents/home pages to help people find what they are looking for with ease.
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The navigation should be flexible enough to accommodate any amount of additional links as you probably will be adding pages periodically. For this using drop-down menus or sectional navigation menus is a must.
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Keep your main links together as much as possible so that visitors can absorb them at one shot and display your tag-line on all pages so they know what your site is about immediately.
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There is no harm is showcasing important links, even if they are repeated links in a different location on the page, if you think they might interest the visitor. Use the title attribute in A tags to describe the linked page.
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If you like a graphic intensive site and find there is not much space for accommodating all your links, you can have a separate home (splash) page and all other pages as content pages. Thus your home page can have visual appeal and your inner content pages can have an elaborate navigation structure that draws focus to the content.
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Use your navigation space efficiently. Use short, clear and precise words in your links so that your visitors know what the corresponding page will contain.
Take a look at our Dreamweaver Templates and Custom Web Design Portfolio to see the various kinds of navigation systems you can use.
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