Practical Tips For Creating Navigation Menu

Understandable and clear navigation is necessary to make the most of your website. Visitors need navigation to access what they are looking for. If a site’s navigation system is too difficult for practical application, people may simply leave the site right after landing on it. Some practical tips on how to develop an effective navigation menu for your website is given below. Please, use it as the recommendations for your own website design strategy.

 

Prioritize the links. In order to build an effective navigation menu, you will need to organize all your links first. It is necessary to rate the links based on their importance. The primary links, such as “services, products, online store, about the company, contact us” should go first at the list. Try to build a kind of a link tree, showing the interconnections between the links. For example:

- Products

- Computer hardware

- Computer software

- Computer gadgets

- About the Company

- Overview

- Our Team

- Career Opportunities

 

In the future navigation menu design you will use top-level links as the primary menu options, while keeping second-level links as roll-over or pop-up options.

 

Ensure the navigation is easy and intuitive. Locating primary menu options at the top or left section of your website is the best practice, because these are the places where people’s eyes will go first. Try to predict what your visitors will look for at your site and give the links to that content, gradually narrowing the scope of the topic. For example, Services -> Website Design -> CMS Solutions…

 

Use the same navigation menu on all web pages. It is a common principle that all the pages of a particular website should have consistent navigation menu bars, so that a visitor could easily navigate among different sections of the website and return to the pages, he has just visited, with no problems. It is also useful to add a navigation panel, showing a visitor where exactly he is now.

 

Get the most of the dynamic website design. If you have a lot of links under multiple categories, it is useful to organize them into pull-down menu bars. Creating dynamic navigation system is easy with multiple free java scripts available in the Internet. However, please keep in mind that overuse of such “technical innovations” can decrease the performance of the site and increase the time required for loading it in the browser.