Site Navigation
When developing a website, it is absolutely imperative that content is easy to locate. Visitors to your site are looking for specific information and if they can't find it on your website they will move on to a competitor's site. There are several key factors you must consider when developing your site navigation.
Use breadcrumb navigation
Breadcrumb navigation allows a visitor to keep track of their location within your website. Using this specific web page as an example, we employ breadcrumb navigation by including the following text in the blue bar at the top of the page: Home / Development / Web Design / Site Navigation. A visitor arriving via a bookmark, search engine, etc. immediately knows their location within your website by simply glancing at the breadcrumb navigation and can easily navigate up one or more levels or go directly to the homepage by clicking the appropriate link in the breadcrumb navigation.
Use standard locations for site navigation links
Web surfers are accustomed to having site navigation links on the left hand side of the web page. It is also somewhat common to have a horizontal bar of links at the top and bottom of the page. Experiment with site navigation at your peril! Deciding to place your site navigation links on the right hand side of the page because you want to be different is ill-advised. Instead of visitors considering it a novel approach, they may hate it and hit their browser's back button and use a different website to find the information they are looking for. Some websites choose to be different in order to fool their visitors into clicking on advertising located where the site navigation links are usually placed. Ultimately such a website is doomed to failure because no one will freely link to such deceptive websites.
Use headings
If the content of a specific web page can be broken down into different sections, each section should have its own heading. This allows visitors to easily scroll down to the specific information they are looking for instead of having to scan through significant amounts of information. A visitor to your website will usually do a quick scan of a page to find relevant information and headings make it easier for them to find the content they want. This page uses headings to separate the different site navigation factors that must be considered.
Keep your web pages reasonable in length (not too short, not too long)
When writing content for your website, your individual web pages should avoid significant amounts of scrolling to reach the end of the page. Many websites are guilty of putting too much content on a single page when the given content could have been separated into multiple pages of content. By breaking content up into multiple pages, it helps the reader find information and also helps with search engine optimization (SEO) as the web page content becomes more focused. When attempting to break up a long page into multiple pages, try to find subsections of content that could be its own page.
On the other hand, you also want to avoid web pages that are too short in length. Many websites go overboard and create an individual web page for a few paragraphs of content while using a "next" button to read on. This is counterproductive as it annoys your visitors when they have to tediously keep clicking "next" in order to find information. It also hurts with search engine optimization (SEO) when you have short web pages with little unique content, making it less likely that you will rank highly for competitive keywords in Google and other search engines.
Use the "three click rule"
Any web page on your website should be reachable within three clicks without using a site map—no matter what web page you start from. For all but the largest of websites, the three click rule should not be difficult to follow as long as you use sensible site navigation. The combination of breadcrumb navigation (mentioned above) allows your visitors to navigate up one or more levels or go directly to the homepage, and each major section of your website should be linked to from your static site navigation links. Each major section should link to further subsections of content as needed with one final page of links pointing to the rest of the links within that section of content. By following the three click rule you make it easier on your visitors to find content quickly and efficiently since they won't be on an endless clicking spree trying to find a specific web page.
Utilizing the above techniques will allow your visitors to quickly find information and be satisfied with your website. Site navigation is extremely important when designing a website; it must be taken very seriously if you hope to build a successful content driven website.