Common Navigation Methods

There are number of methods of guiding prospective visitors through your site. The most effective way of navigation is always found to be a combination of methods. A meaningful text link to an icon will help a visitor a lot. What form your navigation interface takes is not the most important part but it should be consistent throughout your website and its use should be transparent to your visitors - they should not have to spend time trying to figure out how to go from A to B and back. Remember that what is clear to you is not clear to others. It is well known that new users are often unfamiliar with navigation methods.

Here is a list of common navigation methods for your consideration

Text

Text links will help a lot to those using disability software and who may be viewing your website with with images off, or new to the Internet. Be sure that text links are short and to the point. If you desire to add visual interest, try loading text links into table cells with a contrasting background colour.

Site Map or Table of Contents

A table of contents or site map will reduce the number of frustrated visitors making a hasty exit. Even a highly planned and well-organized navigation design may confuse visitor at times. This is very often found with large sites with multiple levels of sub-category topics. The table of contents serves a very useful dual purpose as it is easily 'spidered' by search engine 'bots' or robots. Spidering means when the search engine software will track through the various links on your website or in your sitemap and locate each individual page referenced within your website.

Graphics

Icons

Icons should always be meaningful. Always use alt tags and also support the image with text as part of the image whenever possible.

Tabs

Tabs are said to be a popular type of image map. Tabs allow visitor to navigate with ease between primary topic categories on your site. Tabs for navigation must be eye-catching.

Image Maps

Image maps are used often on splash pages (usually the site entry page but not always the home page of a website) and can also be worked as powerful method navigation through the site. As only a small part of the image map usually changes on each page, it is often a good idea to cut up the large graphic into small pieces and splice the pieces back together in table cells. This will allow the browser to reload the unchanged image pieces from cache, thereby reducing page load times. Photoshop and other graphics programs have built in functions to slice up images which when reassembled on your web pages become seamless.

Flash

If you feel it is appropriate for the site, you may add sound clues and visual interest to your interface with Macromedia Flash

Scripts

Rollovers (Mouseovers)

Recent studies show that mouseovers not only add visual interest to a Web page but also improved click–through rates by approximately 30%, even for experienced surfers. The most widespread techniques switches an ‘on’ image with an ‘off’ image in the same location when the cursor travels over the ‘off’ image. Or changes the text colour of an active link when the mouse cursor moves over it.

Pulldown Menu

It can be simple to provide a site map on every page if access to a Javascript pulldown menu is present. The menus are neither hard to amass, nor will take up much space. They provide a very effective form of navigation by allowing users to go directly to a category or even a page within a category.  

Folder Menu Tree

This helps your visitors to have an in-depth view of various sections of your site. The problem with this type of interface is, the folders may not always fit in with your site design. There can also be problems with overlaps and in some browsers the functions behave differently leading to multi-coding 'fixes' that can be fraught with problems.

Search

Visitors will feel happy if they find a working search engine especially on large sites. A working search engine helps lots for a visitor to locate information quickly. It is simple to generate a search box for content within your own site and there are various methods available which use text files or databases to hold the keywords and content of your site to enable comprehensive searches.

Layers Menu Scroll

You may use a layers script to slide a series of menu items onto your page but again there are browsers differences and limitations you need to keep in mind when using layers.

At the end of the day whatever method you choose needs to be easily maintained, easily updated and modified as your site structure changes and easy for your site visitors to understand and use. It also needs to be accessible to the search engines to ensure the navigation of your website is totally transparent to the 'bots' and that every page you wish to be 'public' can be referenced and found. There are methods to prevent pages and areas of your website from being spidered if you require - perhaps administrative areas or image directories if you wish to prevent copyrighted images being available to Google Images for example.