A bit about navigation

Navigation is possibly the most important aspect of a good web design, your web sites navigation must be easy to find and easier to use. When designing your menu, always consider your users and the questions they will ask.

• Where am I?


• Where can I go?


• Where have I been?

Intuitive Navigation
Creativity can conflict with usability, and usability can be boring, but users expect the navigation of a site to be in the usual places and to work like 80% of the sites on the web. I understand that there are some great sites out there with some really innovative methods of navigation, but if you are going to re-invent the idea of navigation, make sure to test it. Friends and family are great guinea pig when it comes to cheap testing.

Location
The location of your menu system should be in a visible place, and be consistent throughout the site. There are no rules as to pertaining whether the navigation should be on the left, right or top, but the navigation should be visible and separated from the content. If you have a short page, it is OK to place the navigation at the bottom, but users shouldn't have to scroll to get to the menu. For SEO purposes, remember spiders crawl from top-left to bottom-right. If your navigation is full of keywords, it would be wise to have it indexed first.

HTML Only
I am an SEO guy, and I design sites with SEO in mind, and navigation should always be text based for optimum optimization. If you use images, make a secondary, text based navigation for the search engines.

Multiple Ways to Get to Pages
Your menu is not the only form of navigation available on the site. Make sure to drop links to relevant pages in the content and headlines. Using a strong internal linking system will increase your page strength and you can use keywords relevant to the linked page. Make sure the links stand out, you don't have to make them a screaming color, but you do need to make them different from the surrounding text.

Breadcrumbs and Visited Links
Always keep the user's convenience in mind when designing a navigation system. Colored visited links are always a good idea to let the user know where they have been and where they need to go. Breadcrumbs work especially well for the user, they tell the user exactly how they arrived at that page and how to return on their next visit.

Creativity is the key to a good web design, but always keep in mind the abilities of your visitors.