How To Navigate Within The Website ??

In order for better understanding, think what if you are lost at an island? It can be quite dangerous and even fatal if you don’t know how far you have traveled without knowing no sense of what’s around. It gets even more risky if you don’t know how to react or what to do next. Did you get a feel? Exactly! This is the exact feel that your valuable online visitors would feel when there’s no proper navigation system at your website.

Elements for Navigation:

Try out any website available on internet, it must has got a navigational system at its support. When we say “navigation” – it isn’t only confined to the menu & sub menus only. There are multiple ways to make the website run through. However, it would be highly suggested to keep your navigational system as sample as it could be. Therefore, we won’t discuss the complexities involved in designing an advanced navigational system at all. By keeping it plain and simple, it will automatically instigate the online visitor to further peek in your website. One thing you have to ensure here is that provide every possible opportunity to the visitors that can help them navigate through your website. It could be either in form of breadcrumbs, footer links, categories, anchor texts or sidebars.

We would be discussing an imaginary possible navigation map of your website here. The map is basically based upon website’s default layouts that is maintained through content area, header, footer and right sidebar. For the ease of readers, we will refer them as West, North, South, and East respectively. Figure is attached below denoting every area separately.

Discussing The North

Starting with a scenario, say that an online visitor has come across your website while make his entry through the NORTH.

Back Button:    

Back Button is certainly one of the features that is most likely to be accessed by the visitors on any website, especially those who have come across your website for the first time. If a user doesn’t find what he was exactly expecting at a specific page then he would surely hit the back button to start his search again within your website.

Unfortunately, Back button is mostly used as a quick escape from the given page. Better would be that you should introduce such a panel that can offer the users to redirect to other sections of website rather engaging them in “Back & Forward” move.

 Top Navigation:

Generally, the navigation features or options are likely to appear at the top of the website. The significance of top – navigation may not be valuable but it does provide worth the background information of the website. Some developers prefer to add Home & Contact links for the top – navigation menu. While keeping in mind the top – navigation features, you certainly want the same options at such a suitable area on the website which looks prominent to users.

Once you start dividing your website into bits and pieces, you will come to know that there are number of items and menus which couldn’t get fit in the main menu, like:

All the above mentioned links should most likely be the candidates of top – navigation because we need them but not for the focusing purpose.

 Logo:

You’ll see that most of the websites out there do give its logo a prominent place around NORTH. Keep in mind that is the most unique feature just like a lighthouse. There should remain not a single page in your website branded with your Logo.

Link The Logo To Homepage:

You certainly would waste an attractive and appealing option by not linking the LOGO itself directly to your web homepage. It will provide quite a warm and nice touch to your entire website. In this way, all the lost ship roaming around the sea can get back to the harbor safe and sound.

 Trinity:

Don’t you ever do the mistake of linking the LOGO of your website to any other page / section on the website. It is being clearly stated once again that always link the LOGO of your website pointing towards the main page. This is basically a part of trinity that consists upon the first item at main menu, top item in breadcrumbs and lastly Logo.

Main Menu

Main navigation is said to be the global navigation of your website as well. Anyhow, it’s neither global nor horizontal – this term is only to indicate the main menu on the website. Some may call it Top – Level, Primary or Persistent navigation. However, at the end of the day – it remains the main menu.

Main Menu basically denotes the various sections available on your website in quite an efficient, information and clear manner. The main menu should be intelligently titled that means users can get an idea of what option should be clicked to access their desired information. In Site Structure article , we already have given you the instructions about practical insights for website structuring. Make sure that you don’t flood the main menu with unrelated and unwanted options.

Sub menu

Sub menu should be designed in such a way that it is possessed with the detail of the items in main menu. Say, the main item is Football, sub menu should be like News, Leagues, Scorecard and so on. Make sure that all these items of sub menu should also be present at the Main Page of your website.

There are multiple ways to incorporate sub menu into your website. The most obvious and common approach is to induct a drop down menu under the main menu section while it elaborates the options when the mouse hovers on it, as demonstrated in the figure below.