You can have all kinds of great attractions on your site, but if your visitors don't know how to get to them, they'll just collect dust on the server. Worse yet, if visitors find your site's navigation confusing or convoluted, they'll simply give up and head off to explore the rest of the Web, never to return. So, good navigation design is an essential ingredient for any successful Web site.
The navigation scheme is the road map of your site.
- Establish a home and always provide a clear path to your destinations, as well as back home.
At all times and on all pages in your site, you must give the visitor a sense of place, of context within the site. Aside from retaining the same look and feel throughout the pages in your site, there are a few other things you'll want to do to establish this. First and foremost, establish a home base. Your site's home page should act as the crossroads, the point of origin for all traffic going into your site. From here, you must set up the on-line equivalent of road signs—the navigation element—to dictate where your visitors can go from here and how to get there.
- Types of navigation: Hierarchical, Global, Local.
Hierarchical-
Hierarchical applies to sites that are information-rich and are best organized as a large tree, much like a library.
Global- Global applies to sites where you can easily and logically jump among all points; this is best if you are presenting information in fewer, broader categories.
Local- Local navigation sits somewhere in between. This applies when you have depth of information within broader areas.
- Styles of navigation: links, trails, bars, maps and more.
Embedded links: the most basic form of navigation.
Bread-crumb trail: if you're organizing large amounts of information.
Left/top/pop-up nav bar: Most common, generally usable.
Tab navigation: When breaking into a few primary categories.
Site map: One-stop shopping for everything on your site.
Mix and match navigation schemes for optimal useability.
- Be direct in your labels.
- Be consistent across your site.
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Graphics help illustrate navigation, but also include text links.
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