Creating Effective Website Navigation That Works
It is always a good thing to plan your navigation out right from the start so you do not have to backtrack and fix it later on. Simply having the basic navigation in place is not the way to go because ultimately you want an effective website navigation system on your site that effortlessly guides your visitors to wherever they want to go. You can get a better footing with this topic by simply reading this article and weighing it against what your site needs.
Put A Search Box On Your Site
Even relatively small sites should have that little search box on the upper right hand side; so make sure your sites have it too. You won’t believe how much difference having a simple search box can make because people that are too lazy to look around will most definitely want to search throughout your site to get what they want.
Besides that, having a search function makes your website more user friendly and gives you a better standing with your regular visitors. Implementing this on your site is really very simple to do, so there is no excuse for not having one.
Consistent Page To Page Navigation
People value consistency in all things, and your navigation setup must include that principle as well. It shouldn’t keep changing from page to page. There should be a level of consistency so that your visitors aren’t confused. You can make up anchor text if you want, that’s up to you, but you should also mix in some of your keyword phrases.
People really will react negatively when they encounter something that is suddenly different in your site – so be careful about your links and navigation.
Create A Sitemap
There’s no reason as to why you shouldn’t create a sitemap on your site because it’s so essential these days. Regardless of the size of your website, you should add a sitemap to your website or blog so that the search engines and as well as the visitors are able to navigate through your website from a central point.
Bottom line is they are worth it, and the plugin variety makes using them a total no-brainer. So make sure that you’ve got a sitemap listed out on your site so that your navigation isn’t lacking anywhere. Obviously everybody knows that navigation is important even if we still see sites with poor nav.
If your site is already ranked well, then you probably should not touch the navigation as it could cause adverse effects with rankings. So do not neglect this critical aspect of web design, and getting it right will sure lead to an effective website navigation layout.
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Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience
by: James Kalbach
publisher: O’Reilly Media, published: 2007-08-15
ASIN: 0596528108
EAN: 9780596528102
sales rank: 122054
price: $17.97 (new), $17.97 (used)
Thoroughly rewritten for today’s web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various “rich” interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology-it’s about the ways people find information, and how you guide them.
Ideal for beginning to intermediate web designers, managers, other non-designers, and web development pros looking for another perspective, Designing Web Navigation offers basic design principles, development techniques and practical advice, with real-world examples and essential concepts seamlessly folded in. How does your web site serve your business objectives? How does it meet a user’s needs? You’ll learn that navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development. This book:
- Provides the foundations of web navigation and offers a framework for navigation design
- Paints a broad picture of web navigation and basic human information behavior
- Demonstrates how navigation reflects brand and affects site credibility
- Helps you understand the problem you’re trying to solve before you set out to design
- Thoroughly reviews the mechanisms and different types of navigation
- Explores “information scent” and “information shape”
- Explains “persuasive” architecture and other design concepts
- Covers special contexts, such as navigation design for web applications
- Includes an entire chapter on tagging
While Designing Web Navigation focuses on creating navigation systems for large, information-rich sites serving a business purpose, the principles and techniques in the book also apply to small sites. Well researched and cited, this book serves as an excellent reference on the topic, as well as a superb teaching guide. Each chapter ends with suggested reading and a set of questions that offer exercises for experiencing the concepts in action.
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[...] handle of what needs to be included in just about any navigation set-up. If you want to create an effective website navigation visit other sites on the net and emulate the ones you [...]