Global Navigation

Same place, same order, every page.

Opinion page by Duane Alan Hahn.

It's best to have the same navigation on every page, in the same place, and in the same order. It makes it easier for visitors and gives them a kind of comfort zone. Your navigation links should also look like links. If you are using text links, they should be underlined and if they are buttons, they should look like buttons. All links should be recognizable at a glance. Most visitors don't like a navigation Easter egg hunt.

Deactivate Current Page Links

I've been to some poorly designed web sites where you don't really know where you are and then you end up clicking on the navigation for the page that you are already on. Those are two problems that can be easily fixed. Clearly label each page and turn off the navigation link for the active page. Any navigation link that points to the current page should be made 'unclickable' because it gives your visitors one less thing to deal with.

Remember, deactivate the link if you can, but leave it there. Some people delete the link instead. That's not a good idea. Letting the deactivated link sit there helps make it even clearer to your visitors what page they are on. Changing the color of the deactivated link so it stands out from the rest is also a good idea.

Above the Fold

Navigation should be above the fold and at the bottom of each page. If all of your pages are small and the content pretty much stays 'above the fold' anyway, the bottom navigation isn't necessary unless you want button navigation at the top and text navigation at the bottom.

There should always be some type of text navigation on your pages somewhere. One reason is because some visitors use browsers that don't display images. You can read more about this subject from some of the pages listed in the Related Links section near the bottom of this page.

Avoid Fancy Navigation

Another thing you might want to think about is making your navigation as plain and easy to use as possible. Drop-down or cascading menus, glide-in menus, scrolling menus, pull-down menus, slide-down menus, hierarchy menus, portable menus and any kind of menus that follow you around are usually irritating and hard to use. If you feel the need to impress people, try to impress them with your content, not your navigation. Fancy navigation only impresses newbies and the clueless anyway, so why not try to make things easier for your visitors?

Some fancy navigation can crash older computers. There are also inept designers who only test navigation with the high screen resolution that they use, so part of the navigation can be impossible to reach for visitors who use a lower resolution such as 800 x 600.

Many people will not be able to use your web site if you use JavaScript navigation since more and more people are using browsers that block JavaScript. If you absolutely must use JavaScript navigation, at least add normal text link navigation at the bottom of your pages.

Cascading Menus

There seems to be a huge trend among mostly second class web sites of using slow-loading, cascading (animated) menus that bog down navigation. Most of those menus I've tried at web sites are very hard to use. You have to be a master mouse manipulator or the menu will pop back up before you get a chance to click on your choice. It's the same for hierarchy menus too.

Some web designers say that visitors are stupid if they have a difficult time using slow, poorly done, hard to use menus. If you're one of those "web designers," tattoo the following quote on your forehead and it might eventually sink in:

Form follows function.

Louis Henri Sullivan

Mouseover Buttons

Some web designers avoid fancy navigation and just go for a simple mouseover effect. That's not so bad if the images are small in file size, but it is bad when they don't preload the mouseover images. Every time you put the mouse pointer over one of their navigation buttons, you have to wait for the second image to load. It's a problem that doesn't have to exist because there are at least two easy ways to preload images. They can be found using a search engine such as Google.

Two reasons I can think of why people forget to preload images is that they test the page from their hard drive or they test it using only high-speed connections. When you test your own site, try to use different types of connections, and to be accurate, clear your cache before you visit so you are seeing your site the way most first-time visitors do.