This is part six in a series on web site design. Be sure and read Part 5 - Web Site Design: Why Are You Creating A Site?.
Nothing will chase away visitors as effectively as poor navigation. If you don't have a clear, easy-to-understand and easy-to-find navigation system, you practically guarantee that your visitors will never leave the home page of your site.
You should begin planning your navigation system early in the design phase of your site. It is critically important to have defined how your visitors get around before you write a single line of code. Why? Because of the static nature of HTML, it become extremely difficult to change after your site gets fairly significant. It is even difficult to change if you use fancy JavaScript, Java or server-side systems.
What should a good navigation system address?
Navigation must be visible - Your visitors must be able to find your menu or other system immediately upon glancing at your site. This is one of the most critical rules of all. Your visitors will not spend much time looking around to figure out how to get deeper into your site. The web is too big - they will simply surf elsewhere.
Your navigation must be consistent You must present the same exact navigation scheme on every single page of your web site. This will serve to pull your visitors in deeper and deeper ... once they get used to your scheme they will use it without thinking. If you keep changing it from page to page, you just give people one more reason to leave your site.
Navigation must work without graphics Many people surf the web without graphics enabled. Why? Because when you are on a dialup, it's faster by far. I used to do this before I had DSL - I turned off graphics until I found the page I wanted, then I turned the graphics on. This implies that if your navigation scheme is entirely graphics oriented, then you will lose a small percentage of your audience.
Many people include a second navigation scheme at the bottom of each page of their web site. This has become a de-facto standard, and just about anyone who surfs with graphics off knows to look down to the last few lines of a page to find the menus.
Don't use framesI know it is tempting, since making a menu system seems to be the perfect application for frames. I would advise avoiding this temptation. Frames are becoming more and more frowned upon by surfers and webmasters alike. Why? Search engines don't tend to like them very much and it confuses surfers since the URL is the URL of the frame page and not the page which they are looking at.
Navigation should tell your visitors where they are The best navigation systems not only allow visitors to get around a site, they inform them as to their location within the site. Just look at how Yahoo works as you will see. At the top of each page your location is shown like so: "Home > Arts > Art History >", which tells the visitor he's looking at "Art History" in the directory "Art" under the "Home" directory. He can click on any of these to go higher in the list at any time.
Some pages should be referenced on every page of your site - You should have a "Home" button on every single page. It's also wise to include a way to sign the guestbook and contact the webmaster on every page as well. I also like to include a link to the privacy policy, copyright notice and legal information at the bottom of every page.
Avoid fancy navigation systems I prefer the Yahoo approach of straight HTML links myself, and I tend to surf longer on sites which include these kinds of navigation systems. JavaScript and Java menus look very good but if your visitors surf with these features disabled they will not have access to your menus. And given the security scares lately, many people are turning these features off or limiting their use.
Avoid ActiveX and VBScript altogether I love ActiveX and VBScript on an intranet. This is because on an intranet it is possible to guarantee that everyone who will access the site uses Internet Explorer. However, you cannot ensure this on the web, so my recommendation is to avoid these entirely. In addition, the security scheme of ActiveX is so weak that it's common for many people, especially corporate sites, to completely disallow ActiveX controls downloaded from the internet. (Why is ActiveX security weak? Because it depends upon the user to make a decision as to the security of the ActiveX control. I know that when I am presented with a box saying "do I trust xyz control?", I don't usually have any idea. How would I know if the code is trustworthy? My tendency is to just say no.)
To sum it all up, if you want your visitors to explore your site, then you have to make it easy for them. The easier and more straightforward you make your navigation, the deeper people will tend to surf.
Part 7 of this article series is continued in "Web Site Design: Pulling Them In Deeper"
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.