Navigation Menus Can Make Or Break A Web Design

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August 13th, 2010 by James

The most aesthetically sound web design known to man is useless if visitors are unable to find their way around a site. It is not enough for navigation menus to look stylish; as soon as there is a need to visit other parts of a website, an easily-understandable, functioning system is required.

Web visitors have expectations that navigation menus, while perhaps being different in appearance, will work the same way across different websites. It is essential to stick to the main conventions when designing navigation, and to use clear language rather than replacing common words and phrases with ambiguous alternatives. A shopping basket, or shopping cart, should probably not be called by another name unless there is a foolproof way of indicating what that name refers to. In most cases this is not easy to achieve, so using familiar terms makes more sense.

A navigation menu needs to show the user exactly where they are, either in the form of highlighting or changing the text of a link, or in some other way. A breadcrumb menu allows visitors to see the position of the current page within the hierarchy of a site, and this can be additional to the main menu. Too many options cause overload, so in larger websites it can be better not to include the whole navigational structure on every page, but rather narrow down to include the relevant section.

At internet marketing agency Click Consult, we understand how crucial it is to design the navigation menu of a website in order to keep visitors on track.

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