Complex Navigation Made Easy
New webmasters are sometimes overly concerned with things like Flash animations, drop-down menus and other “features” designed to add to their site’s glitz factor — but which do little to enhance usability or functionality. The following bears repeating:
People do not come to your website to be “entertained,” “informed“ or “educated.“ They come seeking answers to specific questions. The faster people can find these answers, the more effective your website will be in generating sales and profits.
Among the most important factors in website design is an easy-to-understand navigation system. The key is to make a potentially complex process simple — not the other way around. The best navigation systems help visitors quickly understand:
- Where they are.
- How to get back to where they have been.
- How to get to the information they need in the shortest number of steps.
Effective navigation starts with a common-sense organizational structure. That structure should resemble the roots of a tree. At the top is the home page and, immediately below it, major departments or sections. Further branching can lead to subsections or individual pages, as needed.
The major departments or sections will comprise what is known as your primary or top-level navigation system. This is generally a series of links, buttons or tabs that appear in a consistent location near the top of every page. (The navigational buttons you’ll find in the top, right-hand corner of this page are a good example.)
The typical dive store is actually three or more related businesses under one roof.
- One business trains divers.
- One business sells, services and rents dive equipment.
- One business conducts travel and local diving activities.
That gives you at least three department headings or sections right there (although you could further break Equipment into Sales, Service and Rentals). Do you operate a charter boat or local dive site? That is yet another potential department heading.
Ideally, your top-level navigation scheme should not only enable visitors to quickly get to the department they want, it should let them know the department they are presently in. Tabbed navigational links are particularly well suited for this — although, as DiveRetailing.com’s top-level navigation shows, there are other alternatives that accomplish much the same thing.
Each of your website’s departments will have its own “home” page — the first page visitors come to after clicking on the link for that section. To help visitors continue from here, you have some choices:
- You could come up with a secondary set of navigational buttons or tabs — although you have to be careful in doing so, lest visitors become confused as to which are your primary and secondary navigational links.
- Most of us rely on menu-driven navigation. This can range from a simple list of links to short paragraphs with links that describe what visitors will discover if they continue further.
At some point, visitors may find themselves several levels down in your website’s root structure. That’s why it’s helpful to provide visitors with a “breadcrumb trail,” which shows them how they got to their present location, and how to get back, if need be.
Each page of your website should also have a set of utility links. These have more to do with completing a specific task than they do getting to a particular destination. Common dive store utility links include E-Mail Us and Get Directions. Another common utility link is Site Map, which provides users with an alternative navigational scheme, much like a book’s table of contents. We’ll discuss each of these utility links in greater detail shortly.
You want to keep in mind that no two users will want to navigate your website in exactly the same manner. Thus, the more navigational tools you can incorporate in your website without causing confusion, the better.
To this end, you might want to consider adding a Search function to your website. Before doing so, however, research the available options carefully. A number of freely available website search functions may end up directing customers to your competitors’ websites, instead of yours.
Navigation in Action
Our sample website incorporates a number of navigational tools.
- Top-level navigation is handled by means of a series of tabs. These are designed so that the section of the website you are currently in stands out.
- Immediately below the tabs is a breadcrumb trail, to help visitors “back up” one or more levels.
- Utility links appear at the top of the right-hand column.
- The “home” page for each section generally contains some sort of menu structure to help visitors continue further.
- At the bottom of each page are hyperlinks that allow visitors to either go back a page, or up to the navigational links at the top of the page. (In some instances, they enable visitors to go forward a page, such as when reading a multi-page article like this.)
What’s important to understand is that this overall navigational scheme is used consistently throughout the site, and follows common web design conventions. This helps make the site as easy to understand and use as possible. See example
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