Management Toolkit

Making navigation user-friendly

Tags:
Web Development,
Navigation,
Design,
Web

Jeffrey Linwood, TechRepublic Tech Republic

Published: 02 Jul 2003 15:29 BST

Navigation is only one segment of a Web site's information architecture, but it is the most visible segment to the end user.

Fortunately, the internal structure of your Web development team doesn't have to be apparent to the end user. For instance, marketing may maintain most of the site, but human resources maintains the job section, and investor relations has outsourced the corporate finance portion of the Web site to an external vendor. If your site shares a navigation strategy, single sign-on, global style sheets, and a universal search engine, these differences will be much less apparent to the user.

But even though many companies have cleaned up their external Web site to present a unified face for each product brand, department, and country, most intranets and Web applications aren't nearly as far down the path toward unified information architecture.

Unifying all your Web applications under one interface can be extremely difficult. Creating a common user interface and unifying all your user logins and passwords with a central directory server or single sign-on solution is a painful application-integration task, especially with legacy, externally hosted (ASP), or third-party software. When you develop a navigation strategy for your Web site, you should consider some common design elements. Most of these have become patterns of one kind or another: Web designers saw other sites use them and then copied the basic idea to their own sites. To provide some insight into navigation best practices, we're going to discuss the following elements and analyse which ones work and which ones don't:

Navigation bars (such as Amazon.com)
Drop-down hover navigation (such as PG.com)
Search boxes (such as Yahoo.com)
Short, persistent URLs (such as Salon.com)

Navigation bars
Navigation bars are the most prevalent form of navigation. These are usually found on the top, left-hand side, or bottom of the page. Your users will expect some of the navigation bars to stay constant throughout your page, usually at the top or bottom. More navigation bars should be added as the user goes deeper into the site. Each level could have a navigation scheme of three or four levels. Any further than that, and you may start chewing into the available space for content, especially with sites that serve banner ads. Most users will also expect to find certain global navigation elements at the top or the bottom of the page (or both), such as Search, Site Map, Contact, Help, and Login/Logout.

You can take two approaches to creating navigation bars: images or text. Images were more popular before most browsers supported Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), because it was easy to change out the image when the mouse pointer rolled over it, to give the end user visual feedback. Text is faster to load and easier to generate from your site's structure, and you can copy the "roll over colour change" effect with DHTML. Use text for your navigation, and you won't have to worry about finding a Web designer at the last minute to create a graphic image for your navigation bars.

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