How Important is Website Navigation?

To define what is navigation, in simple terms it is how people move from one page to another or from one post to another within your website. Now, how important do you think is this factor for a business website?

Site navigation is certainly one of the most important design factors that are to be considered before you work on the layout of your site design. If in case you are going for the pre-designed templates, then you should check the navigation of the site using the demo version of the theme. A site navigation should be clean and simple for a first time visitor and also easy to follow for regular visitors.

It is always recommended that you use sub menu and drop down menu in your top navigation bar which will enable the users to easily navigate through to the destination page. It is suggested that the top navigation bar should contain the categories in which your website content is based. For example, a website on restaurant, can have categories in their top menu for Chinese, Indian, American etc. This makes the visitors easy to identify where the content that they want to read will be exactly located.

It is often practical to imagine yourself in the shoes of your website visitors. Lets assume that you are a visitor and place you in two situations. In the number one situation, say you are entering a website which has a glossy logo and a neat layout. The graphics are great and attractive to eyes. It is human nature to assume that the content in that site would also be great without reading it. On the other hand, say that you are visiting a website which has excellent content but the navigation and design in the website is very poor. This will obviously make you step back and i wonder how many of them would still continue reading the blog, if they are a first time visitor to that website.

Some of the recommendations for having a good website navigation are:

1. Put the main categories in the vertical navigation bar.
2. Use drop down menu with sub pages that are easy to navigate.
3. Have a link to your HOME page from all the other pages.
4. Avoid redirecting the visitors often.
5. Avoid using JavaScript as they may not function if enabled in the browser.
6. It is suggested a visited link is differentiated from the rest of them.
7. A link hover color is always a good aspect of website design.