Getting Lost in a Website : Navigation Principles

Web Design August 26, 2007

Ever go to a website looking for something specific and you just can't seem to navigate your way through the pages to find it? It happens a lot and it's the result of poor navigation planning.

Information architecture I feel is one of those things that you kinda think about but you don't always pay that much attention to when making a website. But really, it ends up being one of the most important parts. After all, the whole point of your website is to display content and if a user can't even find the right content, then what's the point? You want users to find their way around easily. If they have too much trouble, they might just give up and go look at some other site.

The "Nav" Bar

First and foremost, you should always somewhere have a clear-cut navigation bar that appears on every page of your site. A website is not a book or magazine where the user can just flip back a page to read previous content. You always need to provide a guide to your users, a "road map" if you will.

How you organize your nav bar depends on what kind of site you have. If you have a lot of information to display, you probably want to use some kind of hierarchical structure, where a user can start out broad and click links to narrow the focus.

If your site isn't specific like that, maybe you just want links to the main pages of your site. Those pages can have their own links if necessary. What you DON'T want though, is too many "local" navigations. That is, if every page you visit has a different set of links, it gets quite confusing and your users will lose their way.

Top or Side?

You'll notice that most websites either have their navigation on the top or on the side. My preference? It really depends on how many pages you want to link to. If I only have a few, I'll usually make a top navigation. It saves real estate on the rest of the page. But if there are several pages to link to, a side navigation makes more sense because it's easily expandable down the page.

But seriously, please don't use a side navigation if you only have three links or so.

Another option, of course, is using a top navigation that displays more links on mouseover, which seems to be quite popular as well. This isn't my preferred style mostly because sometimes it's unclear how the sublinks are grouped and you often have to mouseover several links before finding the sublink you want.

Wrapping up...

Just make sure your users can find what they're looking for fast and easily. Count the clicks.
Too many clicks means there's a lot to fix :^)

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