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Website Navigation Essentials
By: Iain Row
It sounds simple, but one of the keys to making a site easy to use is giving people a clear indication of where in the site they are now, have been previously, and should go next. This is the job of the website?s navigation elements.
In previous years, the widespread consensus was that the main function of website navigation was to take visitors from your front page to the area of the site that they wanted to visit. However in today?s search engine dominated world wide web, this model is unlikely to be the most accurate.
Overwhelmingly, visitors go directly to content-laden pages, lower down the navigation hierarchy, because these are the ones that search engines direct them to. From there, people will make a decision about whether to browse further, contact you directly, or leave the site. If your navigation design makes it difficult for people to move through the site, they will simply leave.
This is the main reason why the use of frames has largely died out, but it also bodes badly for JavaScript driven dynamic navigation, where elements are not visible until the mouse is over them. If your visitors didn?t use the site navigation to get to the point they are at now, how will they know which area to roll over to get to other useful content?
?Breadcrumb? navigation can help, letting the visitor know how far they are down a certain path, and helping them to come back up, but it provides no clue about what other pages might also be appropriate.
The best solution is to have context-sensitive navigation; when visiting one page, you can see at a glance the other pages in the same section, as well as the other main sections of interest. It may take a little more time to set up in the first place, but when it gives every one of your visitors a clear view of what your website can offer, you?ll see it pay back many times over.
Iain runs Prominent Media, a web development company based in Milton Keynes, UK. His work on context-sensitive navigation led to the development of SiteNav, an XML-based website navigation system that puts professional navigation capabilities in the hands of any computer-literate person. This means that multi-level, contect sensitive navigation, breadcrumbs and sitemaps can be added to any website, and edited by anybody, without the need for expensive CMS software. |
