Your site's navigation should skillfully show visitors where they are, where they can go, and how they can get there. Web users have short attention spans, and aren't afraid of jumping to a potential competitors site that's easier to use.
Create a logical, organized structure for your content, and have your navigation mirror it. When in doubt, follow the "seven plus or minus two" rule of cognitive information processing (Miller, 1956) when organizing content into major categories - generally, this means limiting navigation categories to between five and nine choices per menu, though this rule can be broken where appropriate. If you use cascading menus, make sure that your site can be navigated effectively even with JavaScript and Flash turned off. It's good standard practice to include a redundant set of text-only main navigation links at the bottom of each page, next to your legal and copyright statements.
Global navigation isn't the only way to make it easy for customers to return to the home page or other pages they've recently viewed. The style and color of hypertext links aid navigation too. Too often, graphic designers without much interface design experience will "clean up" the look of a page by making all links - even visited links - the same color, or turn off link underlines except when people mouse over them - and even remove link underlines from the site altogether. These visual clues help visitors distinguish what's clickable from what's not, and where they've been from where they haven't.
If time and budget permit, conduct a simple usability test, and watch what untrained users do when asked to use your web site to "order fifteen #10 widgets" or "find our company mailing address." Usability expert Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think makes a great read during a plane ride, and explains the hows and whys of conducting simple usability tests. Testers are usually not shy about telling you what's wrong with your site, but "real world" users often simply get frustrated and go somewhere else. Make sure your interface works - and fix what doesn't - before it hurts your bottom line. The best navigation doesn't require extra thought on the part of the user, though achieving this can take extra planning, usability testing and design revisions.
Finally, don't put your main navigation on the right side of the page. We'll touch more on why in the next section, but the main reason is that browsers cut off the right side of the page first when a site is wider than the browser window.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. Retrieved May 9, 2007, from York University: Classics in the History of Psychology: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/
About the Author
Dan Wilson is a marketing consultant who has been helping companies reach the next level through their communications efforts for over 14 years. Dan's passion for helping clients achieve their goals has led to many successful campaign launches for Fortune 1000 companies. Dan also served for several years on the program advisory panel for UC Davis Extension, developing course curriculum for and teaching web design and multimedia courses. Dan holds an AA in Art and a BS in Business Marketing, and is a Principal and Founder of MarketDifference Communications Group, a brand development and marketing communications firm based in the Sierra Foothills.
