While the design of a website will attract the attention of visitors on arrive, they will be quickly turned away from a site with a poor navigation.
Designing a website navigation (or menu) is a challenging task a challenge which increases significantly the larger the site gets.
Why Am I Here?
The goal of the site menu is to enable visitors to find the information they are seeking as quickly as possible. So to design a good navigation you first need to ask yourself the question ‘what are visitors most interested in?’. This is the bit that is most overlooked in my view by a lot of businesses. Think of a physical store for example (as opposed to an online store). If you go to a website for a store there is a good chance that:
(a) you plan on visiting the store in person
(b) you are looking for either the contact details or the opening hours.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone going to the site but I regularly find myself in this position only to get to the site and find unclear contact details and no opening hours. This an error in website design and navigation and is annoying to customers.
This actually applies to a lot of businesses especially the contact details. All of the sites we build have a clear contact form that is easy to get to (in the header or footer and usually clearly available in the main navigation). The form provides clear information on the business and allows visitors to send a query through via a secure form. If you are a store why not consider adding a Google Map to your site, its free and very easy.
Forms is another common one. Why large organisations persist with downloadable forms that need to be signed and faxed back is beyond me but almost always they are hidden away somewhere in the navigation making it even more annoying for the customer. It would be simple to include a drop down list seamlessly integrated into the design of the homepage which provided a direct link to common forms. Or perhaps most users are coming to log into the site to access secure information – in that case make the login box easy to find.
Homepage
There are actually a lot of little pieces of information like contact details and forms that people come to websites for. Its important to have these in the navigation but you can also consider using the homepage for quicker links to these things. This can do 2 things:
(1) provide a very obvious, 1-click access to the particular information
(2) encourage the user to visit parts of the sites that they may not have otherwise visited.
Have a look at our website homepage at www.webcircle.com.au. If you have come to our site for any of the following reasons you are only 1 obviously click away from the information:
- For our contact details (contact in the header and footer)
- To read one of our articles (article list on left)
- To subscribe or view our web design newsletter (industry newsletter section)
- To view our latest news or our blog
- If you are considering choosing a web provider (why choose us)
- To demo our Content Management System.
- To learn more about any of our main web design products and services.
Of course there may be other reasons why people are visiting our site but this would cover a large bulk of them. For the rest there is the menu system.
Menu System
Ok so we have designed our homepage so that 90% of visitors will be able to get the information they need within 1 easy and obvious click. Then all we have left are the people who want something other than those common things and the people who don’t know what they are looking for!
For this we have the website menu system.
There are a whole range of options for setting up a menu system on your site. We’ve seen some corkers! You can get very fancy with Flash! At the end of the day though making it harder for people to get the information they seek is just going to turn customers away.
The main site navigation should be based around something logical. For example you might have your main services listed across the top or down the side. Be sure to put home on the far left as that is what people are expecting. Also if you have your logo in the top left, make that linkable to your homepage also. Usually details about the business would go towards the end of the menu rather than the start.
For most small business sites a single menu is sufficient however for larger sites you might need sub-sections within sections. For situations like this, I like to use drop down menus. The reason for this is that they don’t require any additional clicking. So if someone wants to go to a sub-section within Web Design for example they can just mouse over web design and click on the section straight away. It effectively means that everything in the site is 1 click away.
A final word
There are a few other things worth considering in relation to navigation. The first one is a sitemap. They shouldn’t be used to replace an otherwise poorly structured navigation buts it’s a good way to list everything on the site and also good for search engines. If you use a CMS-driven site look at setting a dynamic sitemap up that automatically updates itself when the site changes.
Breadcrumbs are another option which we employ from time to time on bigger sites. Breadcrumbs usually run across the top of the site below the menu and track the visitors progress on the site. For example Home >> Web Design >> eCommerce Websites. They are no substitute for a logical navigation but they can be a good visual indicator to visitors of where they are at within the site and provide a quick way to get back as an alternative to the browser’s back button.
Looking for some inspiration? Try looking at some of the bigger sites on the net:
Google.com – Very clear, uncluttered and it is very obvious how to do what you came to do (search).
Adobe.com – One of the biggest sites on the net but its pretty clear where you have to go to get information. Note the use of the drop down menus.
Realestate.com.au – A very clear map on the homepage no doubt covering the 90& of users who have come to search for property – clear links for everything else.
Written by Dan Norris, Director of Gold Coast Web Design agency Web Circle on 22 October 2008.
