There are numerous views of best practices for page navigation in your site design. But there should be two main aims of getting your page navigation correct - allowing traffic to find their way quickly and easily round the web site and allowing the search engines to find all relevant pages of your site.
If you merely have a small website, half a dozen pages or so, then it is quite easy to display links to all of your pages on every page. But even then, there are mistakes that people might make so do read on!
Keep the main navigation constant
And the first of these is changing the navigation layout on every page. If the navigation structure changes on every page it can be very distracting to the visitors. For example, dropping the current page from the selection of links could alter the layout of the links across the screen and if a reader is working left to right through the links that might cause them to get lost.
Do not hide in text links
Links in text are also open to major problems. I have seen web sites in which these links are in exactly the same font, text decoration and size as the rest of the text. This is a pity as traffic on the website will not realise that they can click a link for further information unless by a few fluke they happen to drop the mouse over the hidden link.
Always have text links
I am not saying that all links must be text links, but if you are using flash, javascript or image links then at the footer of the page add text link equivalents to the pages that you are linking to. This makes sure that traffic using browsers that can not read these technologies, let's say disabled and basic phone browsers, still have the option for the links as do search engines.
Give a link back home
Quite often someone finding a page on your website will want to go to your home page before continuing through the website, or another reader might be deep into the web site and want to get to your home page. So be sure that this link is clear and straightforward to find.
Leave breadcrumbs
If you have a site of merely some pages then probably not needed, but if traffic might click down through a few levels of pages then telling them where they are is a must. The breadcrumbs would typically provide another link to the home page and the pages above the existing page. For example, on an ecommerce site they might selection home page, category page, sub category page and then display the present page name for confirmation.
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Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a web design Merseyside service. For more useful tips, call into the web site design blog .
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