Navigating Your Website

What is Navigation? Website navigation is what helps

visitors find information on your site. Navigation can be images, links,

navigation bars and menus. Navigation should take the guess

work out for your visitors

Before You Build Navigation How is your information structured? What is your audiences screen

resolution? Do you have any trend information on

what your audience uses most? What is your brand? Consider using focus groups, surveys to

assist in deciding what should be included in navigation.

Four Key Elements

Navigation should be: Accessible Meaningful Understandable Prevalent

Types of Navigation Vertical Horizontal Horizontal

and vertical

Navigation Menus Fly-out Dropdown Expandable

Navigation Menus

Yahoo/custom style- Provide an option for that of left navigation or a custom window driven navigation menu (referred as QuickView)that is similar to a mega dropdown with the exception the menu window remains on screen unless the end user selects to close it.

Rollover (or mouse over)- On mouse over of each menu item, each heading visually changes and provides some textual description of the sub-items. Since this is a one-level menu, there must be a sub-level page that provides links to the sub-topics.

Flash menu- Clicking on a heading opens the menu item to show its sub-items, and automatically closes the previously opened menu. The "auto-close" feature may annoy some users.

More Navigation Options

Footer Navigation: Things like legal/privacy policies, contact, site map, FAQ, and other general information about the site or company.

Tabbed navigation: This is getting fairly popular, I’m sure you’ve seen it before. Tabs make each section of the site clear, and provide clean organization.

Mega dropdowns: More like little panels that dropdown from a navigation item that display many options.

Navigation Best Practices Use same navigation on all pages Consistent placement of navigation Provide breadcrumbs Provide a “site map” Use descriptive words on links If you use flash, offer text based as well Use CSS to emphasize links, or visited

links Remember the three click rule

Home Page Navigation Tips Always include a link to your home

page as part of your navigation. A user may not enter your site on the

home page, so make the navigation that they can use it no matter what page they enter your site on.

Home page links should be clear and concise and ALWAYS current.

Other Key Points of Navigation Navigation layers generally exist in a good

website design. Primary navigation (most important links,

categories etc), Secondary navigation (secondary links,

subcategories etc), Position of navigation, link titles, number

of links per page etc.

Navigation Mistakes Using confusing or lengthy flash transitions for

navigation Relying on images to communicate hyperlinks

content Having navigation lead to orphan or dead-end

pages Positioning navigation different places on your site Making navigation same color, font, etc. as your

content Adding sound on navigation Putting a link to every page on your navigation

Going Mobile? Many users surf websites using their

mobile devices. For dropdowns and fly-out menus it is

a good practices make the heading or top-level link a landing page.

In addition to mobile devices, people with styles disabled in their browser may experience similar issues.

In Summary

Your navigation should answer:Where am I?Where I have been?Where can I go?

Your navigation should be consistent Your navigation should not be ever

changing

On-line Resources Usability:

http://usability.gov/pdfs/chapter7.pdf http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10

Navigation: http://webdesign.about.com/cs/webnavigation/a/aaeffectivenav.htm

Footer navigation example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/

Tabbed navigation example –http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/06/showcase-of-well-designed-tabbed-navigation/

Mega dropdowns examples–http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega-dropdown-menus.html

Questions?

For any follow up questions, you may contact:Kathie Glassel: kglassel@pacounties.org

717-526-1010 x 3353OrNic Poague: npoague@pacounties.org

717-526-1010 x 3354