2. The navigation scheme you set up for your web site acts
as its road map so it needs to be clear, structured and
intuitive. No matter how good a site looks or how much
useful information it has, if it does not have sensible
navigation it will confuse visitors or drive them away. If a
person has to look hard to find where they need to go,
then they quickly lose focus and that is fatal to your
chances of keeping them on site.
7. There are many ways of presenting navigation: down
one side of the screen, along the top and bottom or in a
frame. However, think of the search engines, as well as
visitors as most search engines don't like frames or java
script - which they can not be understand. As search
engines need to read the links to index the site properly
and you want good organic listings, java script is not a
good idea and anyway some visitors will have it
disabled.
9. 1: It is important to allow instant access to the rest of
your site from anywhere within it. Ideally, you should be
able to go to any page in a maximum of two clicks and
one is better. Motto: the less clicks the better.
10. 2: Use the same navigation scheme and elements on all
pages. Create a common navigational look to ensure
that your users can use your site navigation effectively.
11. 3: Wherever possible, use text navigation. Think about
the tradeoff between text and graphics. Text based
navigation works better than image based navigation
because it enables users to understand the link
destinations in detail. Too many sites have beautiful and
fancy images for navigation that mean nothing to
visitors. (Ever been abroad and been confused by their
roadside or 'restroom' images?) Research also shows
that 'breadcrumb trails' positioned under the page title
(at eye level and closer to other links on the page) are
used more than breadcrumb trails positioned at the top
of the page.
12. 4: Keep navigation elements (elements meaning
different navigation 'lists') in close proximity and help
users to develop a mental model of your web site.
13. 5: Use the right margin for your web site's main index.
Research shows that users are lazy and click on topics in
the right margin more than topics placed on the left
because they are located much closer to the scroll bar
and they don't have to move their mouse so far! This
allows users to quickly move the pointer between the
scroll bar and the index items. These benefits are
particularly strong for laptops with those horrid fingertip
based mouse controls.
14. 6: Separate important items from housekeeping links.
Housekeeping links are the things people may need to
find from any page but that don't need to be prominent.
For example Privacy Policy, Site Map, FAQs and Contact
Us can appear in the header or footer of the page
15. 7: Make links easy to find. Don't expect visitors to
mouse over every word on the page to discover if it is a
link or not. Links don't have to be underlined, but do
make them a different colour so that they stand out
from surrounding body text and add a hover colour to
links so that users can see what they are about to click.
Use new windows (pop ups) sparingly.
