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How To Design a Successful Site
part 2: Navigation

Contributed by James Hold    Sep 9, 2004
James is eVerity's President and Lead Account Manager.

Poorly designed navigation is the number one reason people will leave your site and never return.

The number one rule of web design is this: "Don't make me think." People spend more time looking for what they want (navigating) then they do actually reading content. The purpose of navigation is to make it easy for them to find what they are looking for without having to think. If you did a good job coming up with a detailed outline and site map (from the previous article) then this will be easy. If not, please go back and read part 1 of this article, Organization.

The cornerstone of effective navigation is consistency. Submenus may change, but your main topics need to be in the same place on every page. Consistency gives people a sense of control by acting as a beacon. Without consistency, visitors to your site will feel lost. Sure, you know where everything is because you designed it, but the visitors to your site are going to have a whole different perspective.

What Not to Include in Your Navigation

First, there are some links that you should not include in your navigation. You should have a contact page, a Terms of Service page to protect yourself, and a Privacy Policy. These are not necessarily related to the topic of your site, but they are extremely important none the less. They are called utility links. Every site should have them. Typically they are in small text at the very top or very bottom of every page of your site. There may be other links that fall into this category. If so, treat them as utility links and don't include them in your navigational scheme.

An exception might be the Contact page. If the purpose of your site is to get people to contact you, then you should also include a link to the contact page in your main navigation.

How to Choose the Best Navigational Scheme for Your Site

This is dependent on the number of pages in your site, the nature of those pages, and your understanding of advanced technologies such as PHP, MySQL, javascript, and DHTML. There are three effective navigational schemes:

  • Main topics across the top, or along the left if there are no subtopics (good for small sites)
  • Main topics across the top, and subtopics along the left. The left menu will have to change depending on which link across the top has been clicked. (most common)
  • Dynamic layered menus (you'll most likely need a programmer for these)

If you have between 3 and 10 main topics, with no subtopics, then you can either put links to those across the top of your page, or along the left. There are few restrictions in this case, so its best to decide based on how it will fit into your graphic design and your creative preferences.

If you have atleast 4 main topics, and those all have subtopics, then the main topics should go across the top of each page, above the main content area. Below that on the left, should be a left menu featuring links to subtopics. These links will need to change depending on which main topic is active (selected).

Another effective navigational scheme uses dynamic layered menus. These should be used if you want people to be able to skip the main topics and go from your homepage directly to a specific page under one of your submenus. You move your mouse over a main topic, and a submenu with subtopics instantly drops down. You move your mouse over one of those, and even more options appear. This enables you to put literally hundreds of links in your main menu, and frees up more screen space by eliminating the need for a left menu.

Dynamic layered menus can only be accomplished using javascript and DHTML, which are advanced technologies outside the scope of this article. If you decide to use this kind of menu remember to check for incompatibilities between different types of browsers and any other technologies you may use later on. If you would like to use this type of navigation on your site, but are not familiar with how to do it and you don't have the time to learn on your own, please log into your account and submit a work order. eVerity can usually set this up for you within 3 to 4 hours, and we can show you how to update it yourself.

Congratulations, the Hard Part is Over!

If you have completed everything up to this point, you have a solid foundation on which to build your web site. You've done the thinking, so visitors to your site won't have to. Now its time to sit down at your computer and get creative. The next article discusses the best way to go about the actual "design" of your site, and how to plug the titles and structure of the site map (from the last article) into your chosen navigational scheme.

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