In the stages of web site design, we’re going to start with a topic that is probably one of the most important aspects of web site design itself, that of navigation. Many a web site has gone to the proverbial Internet graveyard because of poor or non existent navigation, and that is no way to run a business. This article will give you some basic tips on navigation that will make your site one that people will enjoy coming to and not get lost at in the process.
The first thing you need to know, is just what navigation is. Navigation is the term used to describe how a visitor gets from one page of your site to another. Now, if you have a one page web site, this doesn’t usually apply unless you have anchor links on the page that take people to various parts of that page. Normally though, navigation applies to sites with multiple pages. The more pages you have, the more tricky navigation becomes.
Navigation needs to be looked at the way you would look at the table of contents in a book. If you were to go to any table of contents, you’d see a page number next to each chapter name. That way, you could easily jump to that chapter in order to read it. This is especially useful with technical books where you may only need the details for a specific procedure.
Well, web design is no different. Let’s say you had a site on health products and you decided that you wanted to have a main page to greet people, a page with the products you promote, another page with articles that address health related issues and finally a page for people to contact you at if they were to have any questions. Now, this is a very simple web site, but it still can easily illustrate the point.
The navigation should be simple and clear. The most common forms of navigation are either menus that go across the top of the web page or menus that go down either the right or left side. Left is usually more common that right. As to top and side, it’s pretty much split down the middle. The key, however, is that you want the navigation links to be uniform throughout the site. In other words, if you decide to go with left side navigation links for the main page, then, in the case of our example web site, you would also want the links to go down the left side for the products page, articles page and contact page. Each page should have the exact same layout and look exactly the same except for the content on the page.
The easiest way to do this is simply to create a main template that includes all your navigation and use that template for every page on your site. That way, there is no way that you can foul this up as you are simply taking the same HTML shell code and using it for each page. All you need to do is change the content.
Also, make sure that the links to each page are large enough to be seen and attractive looking. You want your navigation to look as interesting as the rest of your site.
While this is a very simple and basic example, it should be more than sufficient to provide you with a web site that people will feel comfortable coming to and not get lost at in the process.
Hope this helped
Daniel Howard
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