Tips on Your web site navigation.

May 12 2009

Posted by Webmasters-central.com as Web Design

Navigation is a method your visitor surfs thruought your web site using links from one page to another page.

You have to keep good navigational system on your site for your visitors so they can move easily between your products. If the home page is great but your visitor has to search for the next page thinking, ‘Gee … a good web site, but where and how to go to product details?’

Think before creating your navigational links:

What are the main parts of my web site?
These still can be divide in to subcategories?
Are text links are enough?
Do I really need graphics?
Is my navigational system appropriate for my site?
Can my navigational system is easy to upgrade or edit in future?
Do I need to create menus?

Whatever method you are going to use always remember a golden rule:

Every page on the site is no more than 3 clicks away from every other page.

No matter how big is your web site and how complicate your links on your pages, keep this as a golden rule. It saves a lot of time to your visitor.

Why should you need a good navigational system?

* To get the necessary information quickly with out getting lost.

* For a pleasant experience to your visitor. If they don’t find what they are looking for even though the page exists, they just leave …

* Good navigation makes easy for search engine crawlers to navigate through your site. This leads to indexing of most or all of your pages in the search engines.

* Most people comes from search engine results. So they may land on any page of your site. So keeping good and consistent navigational system encourages your visitors to stay.

Here are few tips to have a good and effective navigational system.

1. Buttons and graphics: Don’t use much fancy buttons and graphics. Even the effects like mouse overs take long time to download. So keep them to a minimum. If you still want to use graphics optimize them before using. This certainly minimizes the downloading time.

When you use graphics put a small text link below it or ‘alt’ tag, so that it will be easy to understand about the link.

2. Home page: Keep links to your Home page on every page.

3. Keep links atleast in two places: Top or bottom of the page and in the side bar. So on long web pages, they don’t have to scroll up and down to click on the links.

4. Site map: Displaying site map on your web pages is another way of making familiar of your web site to your visitor. They can pick easily where to go and what other links are there that are useful to them.

Some of the scripts that will be useful for you to create site map for your web site:

SiteMap
http://www.metalhead.ws/sitemap

phpSitemapNG (creates html and text file sitemaps too)
http://enarion.net/google/phpsitemapng/

xml-sitemaps.com (creates html and text file sitemaps too)
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

5. Search: Visitors use search function if they see the search box. Usually the web host panel contains some default cgi scripts for you to install by a single click. Use it and keep a search box on your site.

6. Drop down menus: If you have multiple products or many pages, you can create drop down menus, DHTML menus or javascript menus to prevent cluttering of the links. But remember to provide text links in your sitemap for search engines as they can not crawl the links with in <script …. /> tags.

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/

7. Consistency: Use same method on all pages. Keeping links on the top of the page on some pages and drop down list on other confuses the surfer and he might click on the same link thinking it is different.

Author: Radhika (c)
http://www.webmasters-central.com/

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