Principles Of Website Navigation

Your overall objective in relation to the navigation of your website should be for visitors to it to be able to find what they want with as few clicks of the mouse as possible. Put simply, the smaller the number of clicks required by a visitor to find the information that they want, the better your website navigation considered to be. The more times they click without finding the information that they want, the more chance there is that their next click will be the one to take them back to the search engine.

A link is a word, or short phrase, that when clicked takes visitors from one page of your website to another page of your website, and using them effectively as part of your website design is essential. The more pages your website has, the more links you will need.

In theory, each page of your website should link to all of the other pages of your website, as that would mean that visitors only have to click once to find what they are looking for. However, if your website has many pages, then this is impossible, as you would have so many links on each of your pages that there would be little space left for any content. What you should try and do though is have every page that is directly relevant to another page to include a link to it.

You can do this by including links within your written content. For example, if you refer to 'Sony TVs' on one of your pages, and another page on your site gives information on Sony TVs, then you should make the phrase 'Sony TVs' link to your Sony TVs page. You can also have a list of relevant web pages on your website at the end of each of your web pages.

As well as having links within your written content and at the bottom of your written content, you should also incorporate a menu bar along the top, or left hand side, of your website design. You can include many links within a menu bar without cluttering up the look and feel of your website. This is the perfect place to put links that are not directly relevant to the web page that a visitor is viewing, and avoid the need for visitors to have to consistently return to your homepage.