photo credit: austinevan
Website navigation is one of the most important design decisions you can make: for new visitors it’s their only map, and for regular visitors it’s the path back to the stuff they liked. Depressingly, it’s easy to get wrong and hard to do right, but there are easy improvements you can make.
1. Remove confusing names for common navigation elements:
- The home page should be called Home.
- The contact page should be called Contact Us.
- The about page? Ooh, About Us.
In Don’t Make Me Think Steve Krug points out that every time a visitor has to translate your clever name (from “Join the kick-ass team” into “Jobs”) there’s a moment of extra confusion. By itself each one isn’t a big problem, but they add up until the visitor decides your website is kinda annoying, and they leave. This is a convention that exists for a reason, so use it! Your readers will thank you.
2. Make the important stuff obvious: if you want people to buy your purple widget, is there a big Buy Purple Widgets Now link?
3. Don’t fear the sidebar: you can link to an important page (like the Buy Purple Widgets Now) in the top navigation and the sidebar. In the sidebar you can be wordier, and include images. (See the nice picture for the Awesome Website Manifesto?)
4. Make the active page look different in the header navigation.
5. If you have multiple levels of navigation, make sure each step down is logical. Usability experts used to talk about a maximum number of clicks to get to information, now most of them say it doesn’t matter as long as you always know where you are and each click makes sense.
Is your navigation easy to follow? Have you decided to stick with less obvious naming? Tell us in the comments!