Best Methods of Page Navigation in Web site Building

There are loads of views of best practices for page navigation in your website design. But there should be two main aims of getting your page navigation correct - allowing traffic to find their way quickly and easily about the website and allowing the search engines to find all relevant pages of your website.

If you merely have a small website, half a dozen pages or so, then it is quite easy to display links to all of your pages on every page. But even then, there are mistakes that people might make so do read on!

Keep the main navigation constant
And the first of these is changing the navigation layout on every page. If the navigation structure changes on every page it might be very distracting to the visitors. Let's say, dropping the present page from the selection of links might alter the layout of the links across the screen and if a reader is working left to right through the links that could cause them to get lost.

Do not hide in text links
Links in text are also open to major problems. I have seen web-sites in which these links are in exactly the same font, text decoration and size as the rest of the text. This is a pity as traffic on the website will not realise that they could click a link for further information unless by some fluke they happen to drop the mouse more than the hidden link.

Always have text links
I am not saying that all links must be text links, but if you are using flash, javascript or image links then at the footer of the page add text link equivalents to the pages that you are linking to. This makes sure that visitors using browsers that can not read these technologies, let's say disabled and basic mobile browsers, still have the option for the links as do search engines.

Give a link back home
Quite often someone finding a page on your web site will want to go to your home page before continuing through the site, or another visitor may be deep into the web site and want to get to your home page. So make sure that this link is clear and straightforward to find.

Leave breadcrumbs
If you have a web site of only some pages then probably not needed, but if traffic could click down through several levels of pages then telling them where they are is a must. The breadcrumbs would usually provide another link to the home page and the pages above the existing page. Let's say, on an ecommerce website they may selection home page, category page, sub category page and then display the current page name for confirmation.

Article Source: http://www.gamblingarticlessite.net

Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a web design Merseyside service. For more useful tips, call into the web site design blog.

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