Website navigation

Best practices for website navigation

Navigation links could be considered the most important part of your website for 2 reasons:

search engines use them to spider your site
visitors use them to find content

Most usability books focus on the second reason but both are equally important to your web design strategy.

Now, to understand why the type of link is important you have to understand how search engines work. A search engine is basically a "bot" or "spider" that visits a web page that is submitted to it, and spiders the site. A link looks like this:

<a href="http://www.thewebseye.com">Website design</a>

All search engines have their own rules on how they spider and rank sites, but most will visit a page, spider the site by looking for any HREF tags on a page and follow the links to other pages, indexing them as it goes. If it does not find a "href" tag on that page, it is usually blocked from indexing deeper. Some types of navigation are more search engine friendly than others. Since visibility should be a major factor of your web design strategy you need to understand what implications the following types of navigation have for your website. Lets have a look!

Plain text links or image links
DHTML menus
Image Maps
Flash navigation menus
Java applets
JavaScript menus

There is always going to be some trade-off between accessibility and usability. Accessibility is about making the web pages usable by all users including those with impaired vision that use browsers with voice technology. However you should never compromise the visibility of your pages.

Traditionally the navigation menu has been placed on the top in the header area of each web page or along the left side of the web page because usability studies have shown that this is where users instinctively look, however as long as your menu is in the same place on each page, i.e.: consistent, and it is easily identifiable as the navigation menu, it should not matter too much where you place it.

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