How Important is Good Website Navigation?

By Ian Spencer

Can users easily find the information they want and fairly quickly. This sounds very simple but it is sometimes something that is forgotten when a website design is in progress. When you are getting the website designed you can so easily get over involved with the look and feel of the site and overlook things such as:

Menus
Footers
Sitemaps
Image links

Menus are one of the main components and things to consider with menus are:

Where are they going to be positioned?
Will they be text based or images?
Will they link to the right page?

When we look at positioning of menus I believe that you have three options, you can place it at the top of the site, the left hand side or the right hand side. The strongest options are definitely along the top and the right hand side. You can actually choose both options if you have a lot of pages to navigate. They have to go where the user will look for them naturally making navigation simple.

Will the images be text based or an image, remembering that search engines cannot read images. So text based is the best option but if it will compromise the look of the site using images is fine but just make sure that they look right and are Alt tagged, this way you get the best of both worlds.

This sounds like a simple one but the menus must link to the correct pages, there is nothing more frustrating than a site that has broken links, you click onto the page you want and a 404 page comes up. This can at times happen so make sure you have a well designed 404 page so users do not automatically leave your site and go elsewhere. Testing of links must be rigorously done in the early stages of the site going live so that any faults can be adjusted.

Footers not only give you the opportunity to write some text about yourself (good for search engines) but you can also place a small text based menu there. This gives users another option but also helps the menu to be read by search engines. Only make the footer a maximum of two lines though.

Sitemaps are very important to both navigation and search engines. A sitemap has listed within it every page on your website; this can be included in the footer menu. Users can use this as a means of navigation if they want to and believe me with some sites it is by far the quickest way to find out information. Sitemaps are also crawled through by search engines to pick up information, if you don't have one you are definitely missing a trick. They must also be updated every time the site is changed with content to enable the search engines to know about it.

Lastly make sure that any images used are not only clear and relevant but if they are supposed to be linked to a page or are anchored then make sure that it works, again broken links are frustrating to users as it stops them from accessing what they require.

Make sure you mention the above to whoever is designing your site, don't automatically think that it will be done as not all designers put sitemaps in. Hopefully this small guide will help you to understand navigation and allow you to create a user friendly site which will have them coming back for more.