Arguably one of the most important elements with regard to web design is navigation usability. Recognizing this, a great deal of consideration should be put into making sure your website is easy to navigate. After all, if your customers cannot easily navigate your site and find what they are looking for you will risk losing potential new customers and in turn revenue. Can you afford this?
The good news is that it is never too late to improve the usability of your website’s navigation. Whether you are in the process of building a new site or looking to enhance your existing site the following are seven essential usability tips for providing an easy-to-use navigation experience.
1. Clean and Simple Menu Navigation
Your menu navigation should be clean, simple and straightforward. This will help avoid confusion and help ensure your site visitors find what they are looking for quickly.
2. Link Your Logo to Your Home Page
Make sure you logo links to your home page. This is standard practice so your site visitors will expect that clicking your logo will direct them to your home page.
3. Meaningful Link Text
Link text tells your visitors what they are going to be exposed to if they click a link. Therefore, you should make sure you have accurate and descriptive link text.
4. Text Based Sitemap
A well organized sitemap can be a useful method for site visitors to find what they are looking for – especially when it comes to large sites. Additionally, you will reap an SEO benefit ensuring search engines find the most important pages of your site!
5. Website Search
Adding a search capability to your site will help users find what they are looking for fast, especially when a visitor is looking for something specific like a product feature or type.
6. Navigation Active State
Implement an activate state for your menu navigation so your site visitors can easily discover their current location on your website.
7. Breadcrumbs
We have all experienced visiting a site and clicking through a few links only to forget how we made our way to our current location on the site. Avoid this hassle with breadcrumbs, a powerful form of navigation that gives your site visitors an intuitive way to quickly navigate back through the pages of your site.
The above tips, while not mandatory, are fundamental to usable site navigation. Step back and take an honest look at your site, perhaps incorporating one of the above tips could help your visitors more easily navigate your website.
How can WebAssist help? If you’re using Dreamweaver and need to build CSS menus, a sitemap, or want to add search to your website we have the tools you need!
If you have any additional usability tips for navigation we would love to hear them – please feel free to share with a comment!
One tip I would offer is that if you have a JavaScript powered drop down or fly out menu then make sure that the link that triggers the drop down/fly out goes somewhere, preferably a page that summarizes all the links in that drop down/fly out so that no JavaScript enabled browsers i.e. search engine robots can find their way to your content.
Great web site. A lot of useful info here. I am sending it to several friends ans also sharing in delicious. And of course, thanks for your sweat!