Eye On the Web: The Importance of Navigation

Andrea Dudrow

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Reading a book is easy: you start at one end and go until you reach the other. Same thing with a magazine. Maybe you skip over a few of the articles, maybe you’re just looking at the pictures or the horoscopes, but as long as you have it in your hands you know you’re reading the same magazine. In the print world, there is no way to accidentally end up reading a different magazine than the one you started with. You can’t just click onto another book without having some awareness that you are doing so. This is because books are books and magazines are magazines. The Web on the other hand is, well, a Web.
One of the most important elements of good site design is good, consistent navigation. Back in the early days, when there were far fewer Web sites competing for viewers’ attention, designers (who were often people like your Aunt Esther and your cousin Gert from Connecticut) were titillated by things like hyperlinks, patterned backgrounds, and seeing how many fonts they could cram into one site. Of course this was before the Web got so tangled, and way before designers were bandying about terms like “page views” and “download time.”
Keep ’em Clicking
These days it is more important than ever to keep viewers on your site, click, click, clicking for as long as possible. And one of the best ways to keep them there (besides the usual draws like, oh, content) is to make sure they always know where they are. This is where good navigation comes in. Think of navigation as the road map to your Web site. If you’re driving in a strange city, you want to make sure you always know where you are and how to get anyplace else in that city you might like to go, right? It’s the same with your Web site.
Consistent site design goes a long way toward making your site easily navigable. If your site has a left-hand navigation bar on the home page, then it should have a left-hand navigation bar on every other page. If your index page has a black background, all of your other pages should be designed similarly. On this often-overwhelming medium we call the Web, it’s hard enough to know where you are without each page in a site looking completely different from the next.
The same goes for fonts. Sure there are all sorts of nifty looking fonts out there, but you should choose one or two, and use them. You know how annoying and distracting it can be to read a magazine that changes fonts page after page.
Do As You Say
Remember to click around your site yourself. Can you get to every page of your site from every other page? Viewers are less likely to visit areas they have to work to get to. I’ve always liked sites that have their navigation schemes set up in departments, with sub-categories within those departments. For instance, if you are in the products section of a corporate site, the names of the products appear in that section of the navigation bar; if you are in another section, they are invisible.
Something else to keep in mind: though the number of cable modem and DSL subscribers is now in the millions, we are not living in a broadband world yet. So don’t make your navigation graphics so involved that they take more than a second or two to download. You don’t want to put people off before they even get to your site.
And, finally, you might want to consider staying a little further away from one of the original building blocks of the Web: hyperlinked text. Sure it’s tempting to have every other word on your site link to something, but it can be a little overwhelming for the viewer. Remember when Wired magazine first came out and short articles would jump from page to page, with only a few lines of text on each? By the time you finished the story, you had no idea where you began, or where the next one started. Don’t let this happen to your Web site.
Next week, we’ll take a look at sites with innovative navigation schemes, but for now, the two words to remember are: simplicity and consistency. Again, it’s easy to get caught up in the bells and whistles today’s Web technology makes possible, but bells and whistles don’t always make for a good, well-designed site.
Andrea Dudrow is a writer living in sunny San Francisco. She has been covering the Web and Web design for the past four years and has contributed to Macworld, MacWEEK, eMediaweekly, Adobe.com, Adobe magazine, Publish, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She also writes about arts and culture, and spends a great deal of time fantasizing about the broadband future.