The art of good site navigation
Posted by Rob on 09 Aug 2008 in Usability | Permalink
Imagine if we lived in a world where there were no signposts or maps, it would be virtually impossible to go anywhere unless you knew the area like the back of your hand. And so it is with web sites.
For first time visitors to your site it’s essential to make it as easy as possible for them to find their way around, after all they will all be strangers and not know where things are.
The main navigation menu
We’re all probably familiar with these, they usually sit at the top or side of the page and are well defined and obvious. In most cases they will point to different sections of the site such as “News”, “Gallery” or “Shop”, giving the visitor a clear indication of where they will go when they click.
Sub navigation
If you have a large site with many sections and sub pages you can’t link to them all from the main menu, so the normal method is to provide a second level of navigation. Ideally this will be in a highly visible place such as a sidebar, or even immediately below the main navigation. To make things easier for the visitor it’s often a good idea to highlight these links in a unique fashion, either by styling them with a bit of CSS, or giving the block of links a heading.
Links in content
While reading your copy text it’s important to make linked text obvious, there are a lot of people with less than perfect vision and visual clues will help them understand what you’re saying. For instance this link to Expression Engine is very obvious, but this link to Expression Engine is not!
Image links
Just because an image is linked somewhere it’s not always obvious to the reader, so never rely on that single link alone, and where you can add a text link to the same destination in the block of copy text that the image relates to.
Going home
In my (humble) opinion there should be a highly visible link to your home page on every page, so if a visitor gets lost on your site they can click it to re-orientate themselves. A second option is to provide a HTML site map link as well so people can see links to your whole site at a glance.
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