Best Practices of Page Navigation in Website Design

Filed in Building Websites, Coding Tips on Jul.19, 2010 By Keith Lunt

Getting the page navigation correct in your website design is critical. Get it wrong and your visitors and the search engines cannot find their way around the site. Get it right and you will have a well optimised site in which visitors can find what they want.

There are many views of best practices for page navigation in your website design. But there should be two main aims of getting your page navigation correct – allowing visitors to find their way quickly and easily around the website and allowing the search engines to find all relevant pages of your website.

If you only have a small site, half a dozen pages or so, then it is quite easy to display links to all of your pages on every page. But even then, there are mistakes that people can make so do read on!

Keep the main navigation constant
And the first of these is changing the navigation layout on every page. If the navigation structure changes on every page it can be very distracting to the visitors. For example, dropping the current page from the list of links can alter the layout of the links across the screen and if a visitor is working left to right through the links that can cause them to get lost.

Do not hide in text links
Links in text are also open to major problems. I have seen websites in which these links are in exactly the same font, text decoration and size as the rest of the text. This is a shame as visitors on the site will not realise that they can click a link for further information unless by some fluke they happen to drop the mouse over the hidden link.

Always have text links
I am not saying that all links must be text links, but if you are using flash, javascript or image links then at the footer of the page add text link equivalents to the pages that you are linking to. This makes sure that visitors using browsers that can not read these technologies, such as disabled and basic mobile browsers, still have the option for the links as do search engines.

Give a link back home
Quite often someone finding a page on your website will want to go to your home page before continuing through the site, or another visitor might be deep into the website and want to get to your home page. So make sure that this link is clear and easy to find.

Leave breadcrumbs
If you have a website of just a few pages then maybe not needed, but if visitors can click down through several levels of pages then telling them where they are is a must. The breadcrumbs would usually provide another link to the home page and the pages above the current page. For example, on an ecommerce website they might list home page, category page, sub category page and then display the current page name for confirmation.

You might have other ideas for navigation best practices in website design – if so then please do leave a comment.