Effective navigation can make your site easy to use or can cause visitors to leave your site in frustration. How many times have you been on a site and been annoyed because you couldn’t find what you wanted or the information you were looking for wasn’t where you expected it to be? Website visitors have been trained to a certain degree to look for information in the most probable places, and when they don’t find what they’re looking for, they get frustrated and leave. With some planning, you can create your next site so that website visitors can find what they want quickly and easily.
Organize Your Information Well
When designing a website, think about the structure of the site first. Create an outline of all of the pages and try to organize the information in the most logical way. What will make the most sense to your website visitors?
Get the Most out of Your Primary and Secondary Navigation
The primary navigation will help visitors drill down to the information they are looking for. From within those main sections, display a list of secondary navigation items to help the user find the page that he is looking for within that section.
You can design these links however you want, but the important thing is to be consistent. Keep your primary navigation in the same place on the page no matter what page the visitor is on. This continuity on each page will allow the user to easily navigate through the rest of your site. Here are some other helpful tips:
- Order your links in terms of the importance of each page. If your website is selling books, make the links to the different book departments very prominent.
- Remind the user where they are. When a user clicks on the About Us section, change the color of that navigation item to something different to show the user where they are.
- Don’t overload your primary navigation with links to every page in your site. Simple is better. If you have too many primary navigation links, think about consolidating some of the pages or moving some information to sub-sections on your site.
- Keep the names of your site navigation meaningful. Don’t use terms that are internal to your organization. Someone who has never been to your site before should know immediately where the link will take them.
Here are examples of effective primary and secondary navigation:
Create Your Footer Navigation Wisely
There are some links that need to be on every page, but don’t neccessarily need to be featured prominently on the site. These links can be part of your footer navigation. Here are some examples of links that can be linked from your footer:
- Privacy Policy
- Terms and Conditions
- Site Map
- Shipping Information
- Returns Policy
Use Progression Navigation
If your website contains a shopping cart or a multi-page registration form, it’s a good idea to display progression navigation. You can do this at the top of the page by displaying where the user is at in the process, such as “Step 2 of 4 – Billing Information”. This sets the expectation with the visitor how many screens he must go through in order to finish the process. It also allows the visitor to click to one of the previous steps if they need to make changes.
Create a Breadcrumb Trail
On sites that are large, it can be useful to implement breadcrumb navigation. This provides the visitor some visual clues that tell them where they are and how they can navigate back to any previous section. Breadcrumbs are extremely helpful if the website visitor is linked from an external site. It gives them a sense of where this page fits in with the rest of the site structure. Generally these breadcrumbs are displayed toward the top of the page, below the main navigation.
Other Helpful Tips
- Try to minimize the number of clicks it takes to get to the relevant information as possible.
- Don’t open pages in new windows, unless they go to an external site. This confuses users and disables their “Back” button.
- Make your “Contact Us” link prominent and obvious.
- Don’t change the position of design elements from page to page. As a general rule, keep the header and footer of the site consistent on every page.
- Use consistent names in your page headers. If the user clicks on “About Us”, display “About Us” as the header on that page.
- Always have your logo link to your site’s home page.
- Use a site map of text links to provide structure of your site to provide direct access to your site’s content. Make sure that your site map reinforces your site’s hierarchy.
- Unless your site is small, don’t put every link on every page. This can be confusing and can overwhelm your visitor. Create a logical organization of pages using sub-navigation and provide a link to your site map.
- Above everything else, make your site’s navigation consistent! Don’t make your visitors have to re-learn the navigation depending on what page they are on.
What tips do you have for creating effective site navigation? What sites have you found that use effective navigation? Share in the comments below!
