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Navigation Bars
This is by far the most common, and arguably the simplest method of navigation used on most websites. This method of navigation involves providing links to the most important areas of your website. Preferably, you would use simple text anchors that describe the target page as fully as possible.
You should always have links to your home page and contact page in your navigation bar, with four or five other links in between the two. Four or five other links is the general rule of thumb for most simple sites, but this doesn’t mean that you cannot just have three other links, or have slightly more than five!
All of the links should be clearly labelled giving a detailed description of the target page for two reasons:
a) More information for the visitor who may be new to the site
b) Search engine links to the anchor text of the target page, so if the links are ambiguous it could put potential customers off.
Links that are to do with your privacy policy, ‘about us’ and anything legal would do better as a footer. They may be interesting, but are not as essential for your visitor to see, as what you are selling etc. So keep them out of the way so that only the people who want to find them notice them, and your ‘normal’ everyday visitor doesn’t have to trudge past all those links in order to find what they are looking for.
Most navigation bars are placed across the top or down the left hand side of the page. The exception to this rule seems to be blogs, which have their navigation on the right hand side of the page. The general rule seems to be to place navigation bars at the top of the page, unless you have too many to do that, in which case you put them across the left hand side. But, if you have that many links, your site loses its focus and visitors will not know what to do so probably best to try and find a balance!
More complex websites may have a dropdown menu to allow visitors more options than purely those on their navigation bar. However, if your visitors don’t know that the menu is a dropdown, the chances are they won’t linger over the dropdown options long enough to find out about them.
Dropdown menus also produce a couple of problems in terms of:
a) visitors using PDA probably won’t be able to see your dropdown navigation menu
b) Search engines. The dropdown text can be indexed by them, but the anchor text is hidden away in the JavaScript, making it invisible to search engines.
Your best solution if you want to use a dropdown menu is to use a Son of Suckerfish dropdown menu, because it relies on CSS rather than JavaScript. But even this is not perfect, so if you want your site to be as efficient as possible, you would be better to try an alternative to a dropdown navigation menu.
Call our friendly team on 08450 533111 to discuss your particular requirements. E-mail info@ictinsite.com
ictinsite is a trading name of ICT (NW) Limited, company reg no:- 4364717, Registered office:- ICT House, Rough Hey Road, Grimsargh, Preston, Lancashire, PR2 5AR
