In some of my previous articles I've touched on how important it is to provide your visitors with good Web site navigation. By site navigation, I'm talking about the links your visitors use to move from one page to another. Your approach to navigation can actually make or break your site because it has a significant affect on your site's performance and usability. In this article, I'm going to focus on how you set up a navigation menu. A navigation menu is a set of links that appear on every page of the site for quick access to the most important features.
My last article talked about the benefits of using a bubble diagram to organize your site. You'll find that, when designing navigation, organization is king. Although it is possible to give visitors direct access to virtually every page of the site (a "site map" page frequently does just that), they will feel more comfortable if their browsing experience is guided by an intelligent organization of material and what I call "transition pages," which are pages that introduce a group of related information pages.
Building a navigation menu for a well-organized site is much easier than doing so for one that is poorly organized. Your navigation menu should give visitors immediate access to all of the major transition points in your site. From these transition points, visitors get closer to what they are looking for, or they realize they need to try again.
You can construct your navigation menu in a variety of ways. However, most solutions are a combination of two possibilities: graphical versus non-graphical, and scripted versus non-scripted. Graphical refers to whether or not you use graphic images for your navigation links. Scripted refers to whether or not you use JavaScript to create special effects in reaction to mouse movement.
If you've read any of my prior articles, you know I have a bias for non-graphical, non-scripted navigation because it is generally browser-safe and efficient. Using graphics means the browser must download those graphics, and JavaScript can generate browser errors. On the other hand, it is possible to use both graphics and scripting safely if you know what you are doing and you test your work on every browser you intend to support.
Regardless of which method you use, your main navigation menu should give your visitors an easy way to reach all of the major areas of your site. If your site is fairly large, you may want to introduce an additional menu on your transition pages that is positioned under, or next to, the main menu. This new menu provides access to more specific transition pages, and should appear on every page under the major area. Using your transition pages and this cascading menu approach makes it easy for visitors to drill down through your site and acquire the information they are looking for.
If you feel comfortable with putting scripting into your site, you can build the cascading menu effect right into the main navigation menu. When visitors position their mouse over a menu item, the related sub-menu "drops down" or "flies out" from it. This feature can provide a quick way to get to virtually any page of the site from any other page, but it could also be considered "mystery meat" navigation, which means you don't know the feature exists unless you happen to position your mouse over the menu for long enough to trigger the drop-down.
You may want to take a close look at your site statistics and provide a "Most Popular Pages" menu item. This link takes visitors to a transition page with direct links to the most popular information pages on your site. Another possibility is the "Most Recent Pages" menu item that takes visitors to a list of the most recently added or changed information pages. Naturally, you want to include these information pages in your normal navigation scheme as well.
The next time you feel like doing something significant to improve the quality of your site, take a moment to consider your organization and navigation scheme. Even if you make no changes to the content of your site, an improvement in its usability can substantially enhance your visitor's experience.
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