Web site Navigation Tips

Prepare your site navigation before designing to prevent
cluttering up the site with forgotten links.

A clean-cut and uniform navigation system is a must.

If you have too many links then you should use drop-down
menus or flyouts for your main topics. If you have Fireworks or
Dreamweaver then macromedia drop-down menus are one of their most
popular in-built “Behaviors”. Otherwise you can use our own
copy-paste code for drop-down menus in the article SmartWebby
Drop-down Menus (This article is part of our Simple DHTML Guide a
collection of copy-paste DHTML snippets written especially for
designers).

Maintain a site map or section contents/home pages to help
people find what they are looking for with ease.

The navigation should be flexible enough to accommodate any
amount of additional links in case you probably will be adding
pages periodically. For this using drop-down menus or section home
pages is a must.

Keep your main links together as much as possible so that
visitors can absorb them at one shot and know what your site
conveys about your company. Check out how all our major links
appear in our top navigation bar and all related section links are
listed in the right hand side menu.

There is no harm is showcasing important links (even repeated
links) that you think might interest the visitor. Small boxes
describing the link should look good.

If you like a graphic intensive site and find there is not
much space for accommodating all your links, you can have a
separate home (splash) page and all other pages as content pages.
Thus your home page can have visual appeal and your inner content
pages can have elaborate navigation structures while focusing on
the content.

Use your navigation space efficiently. Use short, clear and
precise words in your links so that your visitors know what the
corresponding page will contain.