Effective site navigation allows your site visitors find what they are looking for quickly and easily. And search engine robots would literally be lost without it, their spiders read the navigational links in order to index your site.
Content may very well be king, but only if your visitors are able to find it. Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining the stickiness of your site - how long your visitor stays and explores your site.
Ask yourself this, What do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them.
If your visitor fails to see what else they find interesting, then they will just leave and all your carefully crafted Content will be wasted.
Whatever form your Navigation system takes you need to remember this simple rule - every page on your site can be reached within 3 clicks. This rule applies to search engines also, where pages more than 3 clicks away are not indexed.
Visitors to our site are presented with two levels of navigation - on the left of every page. The top level shows categories and the second level shows category contents. Therefore no page is more than 2 clicks away.
If a visitor does get lost or wants to navigate to another part of the site we have provided both a Search Box (top right hand corner of every page) and a Site Map - the link is in the footer bar at the bottom of every page.
There is nothing worse than having a well designed navigational system on the index/home page of your site, only to find something completely different on subsequent, internal pages.
Always ask yourself these simple questions:
If your navigation system does not easily answer the questions (when you are on every page in the site) then it needs to be overhauled straight away. If you get lost - how do you expect a visitor to use your site?
Another very effective way of letting your visitors know where they are is to use a "breadcrumb trail". A breadcrumb trail explicitly shows the path from the homepage to the current page. Each element of the path should be hyperlinked to its corresponding web page.
A breadcrumb trail looks like this, and is usually found near the top of the page:
Home > Articles > Web Design > Current Article
The words "Home", "Articles" and "Web Design" should be hyperlinked to their corresponding web page. "Current Article" will not be hyperlinked, since it corresponds to the page that is already on the screen.
An easy way to manage pages in your site is by replacing chunks of repeating code, such as your navigation links, with server side include (SSI) or PHP Includes files. Instead of repeating the same code over and over, you create a separate file with just that chunk of repeated code in it, then place a line of code on each page that tells the server to insert the contents of a
separate file into that spot on the page.
When someone clicks on your page they see the page as you want it displayed - the SSI or PHP
Includes "fetches" the separate file & displays it within your page,
exactly as designed.
How to make SSI pages
How to make PHP Includes pages
Webcritique.org is a Priday Design Studio service.
Priday Design Studio is based in Birmingham, UK and provides web design and site maintenance services for SME & club/associations throughout the UK. Domain names and hosting facilities are provided by associated site, PDS-Hosting Solutions, enabling us to provide you with a complete service.