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Web Site Design Tips - Navigation

In this installment of web site design tips, I want to talk about what may very well be the most important part of web site design, navigation. Without an easily navigated site, your visitors can get easily lost and disoriented, ultimately leading to them leaving your site in frustration without getting the information that they need and without YOU making the sales that you want. This article will give you some basic tips for creating the navigation of your site. Hopefully, after reading this, you'll have a solid game plan in place for creating the navigation of your site.

The first thing about navigation that is critical to understand is that your visitors have to be able to find it. So many site developers create navigation bars that so blend in with the rest of the site that visitors have absolutely no idea where it is. After a few minutes, if they even stay that long, they leave the site in disgust because they can't find the page that they're looking for. So it is important to make your navigation bar stand out on the page. Don't make people hunt for it.

The next thing about your navigation bar is that you want things to flow in an orderly fashion. Web surfers are used to finding certain options in certain places. For example, the home page link of your site should be the first link on your navigation bar because that's where people are used to seeing it. Conversely, the contact us link should be the last one on the navigation bar, again because that's where most people expect to find it. By having your links thrown together in no particular order, this makes it difficult for what I call "seasoned surfers" to find things.

The next thing you want to do is make sure that all your navigation links are working. The last thing you want is for a visitor to click on your "products" page and be greeted by a 404 error. It is critical that you test every link on every page to make sure that it is functional. There are free tools online that you can use to do this. The whole procedure will take a matter of seconds. This is critical especially if you have a site with a large number of pages.

Finally, you want to include navigation to other pages of your site, internally within the text of your pages. For example, if you have a page on golf clubs and there is a mention on that page about the importance of choosing the right kind of "wood" and you have a whole page dedicated to nothing but "woods", make sure you have that word "wood" linking to the page on woods. This will not only give visitors additional ways to get from one page to another but also improve your search engine rankings.

Web surfers like to be able to easily get around a web site. We live in a fast paced world and people don't have the time to go around looking for links to things. If they don't find them, they're gone. So take the time to do the things I've mentioned in this article.