The Right Navigator For You
by: Maricon Williams
If you think it's hard to decide what navigational style to use and what design fits you best, then read on and be enlightened…
Text links are the simplest sort of navigation. Usually they contain one to two words and are filed in an array. Example to this is the array Home – About Us- Contact Us. Using this links, you can load fast. With this cascading style you can also apply varying colors, background and other attributes such as underlines. Text links can also help your search engine rankings to soar. Nevertheless, some of its disadvantages are being not flashy and the size cannot be exacted. The fonts in this style can be shown on different operating system such as Linux and Windows.
Graphic buttons is another navigational style. They are not fast loading compared to text links, however, they are eye-catchers. They can flow with your page's design. Graphic buttons also maintain a width and a height which is kept standard transversely in all browsers if the height and width are provided in the image's tag. Their disadvantage though is that it requires longer loading time. They are also less descriptive, require more labor and more bandwidth to download from the server. The use of mouse will double the downloading time. Graphic buttons are oftentimes applied for few links or a maximum of five links.
Image map is also a style where one image is divided into "hot spots" for the navigation. The advantages of image map include an easy set up of one image. However, this style has many disadvantages. First, they create frustration when trying to put in another link. With regards to the users, it requires them to actually observe in order to find the right boundaries.
Apart from the different styles of the links, you must also decide how to layout. Basically the navigation location is up to you, but endeavor some proper positioning. Explore your imagination to get what you want to achieve.
Remember that navigation should be in the interest of your visitors. If they have trouble finding their way around your site it means that navigation is not effective. Try to plan it again until you have best results.
