What does a person, who enters a house and finds all the doors of the rooms locked supposedly do? He, in all will walk out of the same door he came in through! In the exact same way, by compromising on the navigation system of your site, you are just pushing the visitors out.

Agreed, you spend a hell lot of time energy and yeah of course money to get your website up on the top of search engine rankings. And yes, the visitors start to pour in. but making them come there is just half the battle won. What matters is how do you make them stay?

A good navigation system is the backbone of the website. This is one of the invisible aspects that make all the difference between a great and a moderate website. Some basic factors need to be taken care of before you frown about anything else.

Information Architecture
Information architecture is the taxonomy or structure of the website that needs to be defined even prior to the planning stages of the navigation. These constitute the very basic elements that define the nature and working of the website.

A typical corporate or business web page has the following taxonomy:
Products that has information about the products and services the company has on offer
About Us that presents information about the company
Investor Relations that contains information specific to investors
Support that offers help to customers

The personal WebPages have elements like
About Me, that presents information about the author of the page
Favorite Links that offers information about the links preferred by the author
Friends & Family that contains information about the author’s friends and family.

Organization
The organizational structure follows the website architecture. Once the elements of the web pages have been decided upon, there comes a need to organize all of them. Like there can be one single directory that is linked to the major pages from the front page of the site, or there can be multiple directories for all the sub pages.
The organizational structure should be in accordance with the visitors browsing habits. You can map out several paths for the visitors to use.

Navigation design
Now that the architecture and organization has been taken care of, you can work on the navigation design of the website. But make sure you take care of some crucial points while developing the design:

• Navigation if the skeleton on which the website is wrapped. Avoid special effects like Flash, Java or JavaScript. Instead make the navigation design more accessible by cutting down o all unnecessary elements.

• The navigation design should not be vague and unclear. All the technical excellence will go down the drain if you confuse users with fancy labels that give them no clue about what they actually are. Restrain from using terms that are internal to your organization as again the user wouldn’t be able to comprehend their meaning. Keep the labels as simple as you can so that it takes but a glance for viewers to know what they are.

• Though avoidable, but if you are really keen on using images for navigation, make sure there is some accompanying text with them. The use of non-descriptive images as navigation is called Mystery Meat Navigation.

• The navigation should be visible on every page of the website. The basic navigation structure should be consistent throughout with differences only to indicate the hierarchy of the location within the website premises.

If by any chance, there has to be some changes in the navigation structure after you have fully designed it, make sure to inject these changes globally. The modifications should also conform to the original goals of your taxonomy and information architecture.



Michael Henderson is an expert at web solutions and search engine optimization and has many Indian and international web design projects to his credit. His experience in the field of web technologies has earned him the post of acting consultant for several corporate houses. He advises the web development team to develop pages based on the W3C guidelines.