Choosing the correct navigation for your website

8 March 2009

You can have really good and useful content on your website, but what's the use if your website visitors can't even find it?

The navigation on a website is very important and should be thought about very carefully in the early stages of building a website.

The positioning should always be along the top or down the left hand side as users read left-to-right and from top-to-bottom and so it's more logical and good website practice.

The suggested short term memory can handle 7 items plus or minus 2 and so I'd suggest having 5, 7 or 9 main navigation links.

If you need more links then it's a good idea to divide your links into categories and have sub navigation for each main navigation link.

The navigation text needs to be informative, search engine friendly and not misleading or have multiple meanings. Link text is a good method in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and so the link text should include keywords if possible. Also having informative links will tell your website visitors exactly what they're going to see before they even click on it. Always make sure that the link text is not misleading, otherwise the website visitor may click there expecting to see something else, or they could get lost within your website, or even worse they may not be able to find the page they're looking for and so just give up.

Normal practice is to have your home page link first, as this is usually the first page that the visitor sees and normal practice is to see this link first.

After the home page link you should show your links in order of relevance but yet still as logical as possible.

If you plan to have a contact type page, or a page for useful links then these are usually 2 of the last links that you will see in the navigation. As this is normal practice I would always stick to this ruling as it's what most Internet users are used to and the last thing a website wants to do is confuse the user as this is a way to lose a lot of visitors quickly.

Always make sure that your website does have a contact page, or contact information easily visible - as if the wesbsite visitor can't find what they're looking for the last resort may be for them to contact you and ask for the information that they're looking for.

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