Navigation Should Answer the Following Questions:

Where am I?
Where can I go from here?
Where was I already?

You can't ensure that all visitors will enter your site from your home page and proceed to click on hyperlinks in an orderly fashion. So you must answer the question of “where am I” at all times. The name or logo of your company along with a page name should be on top of every page in your web site. The company name or logo should also be your link back to your home page. The home page should answer the question “where am I” by yelling it out. There should be no guessing of what your web site does for your visitor.

Your visitor will always want to know “where can I go from here”. This being links to pages within your web site or links to an outside web page. Either way you should put links in context. In other words you should give the visitor an insight on where the link will take them. This is especially true if you have a resources page. Do not put just the links. (Like I have time to click on each one to find out where they go.) Give a small description of that web site in context with the link.

I highly recommend the use of link titles. Normally I would tell you to wait on new web technologies that can't be used by all visitors. This is one exception to the rule. A web browser that does not understand link titles will simply skip over it. The only downside is the extra download time. It takes approximately .1 second to download each link title. This is worth the extra time for those who can see it. Link titles improve the navigation usability.

Users want to know if they already visited a page. It is very frustrating to click on a link to bring you back to a page that you just visited. I'm not to sure why the pioneers of the web made unvisited links blue, considering blue is harder to read then say red or black, but they did and now it's the standard. For your navigation to work well you should use blue for unvisited and purple for visited as a color scheme. Using other colors will just confuse people.

Not every one will understand your primary navigation so make sure you have alternatives. The chances increase that someone will find what they are looking for if you have at least two forms of navigational schemes.

Web site design tips provided by scott@designmore.com visit his site at designmore.com

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