How To Create Great Website Navigation

The single most important aspect to keep in mind when building a site is to keep it simple. People are not on your site for a wild goose chase. Don’t require visitors to have to think about where they need to go and how to get there.

In fact, more than three-quarters of survey respondents from a HubSpot study said that the most important element in website design is ease in finding information.

How To Create Great Website Navigation

Bottom line – if people can’t find what they are looking for immediately, they will give up and leave your website – and statistics have proven that they will never return. This means you have one opportunity to make an impact.

The Basics to Great Navigation

There’s a little more to it than that as well but since we practice what we preach here at Studio C5 – here are the basics to building a great navigation:

You should have the same navigational menu on every page of your website. Keep it simple with a consistent “top 5-6”.
This navigation menu should consist of “home,” leading to the homepage, right under the logo on the top left of the page, and four to five other main components / categories of your site to the right of that
Provide location-based feedback by using breadcrumbs, matching the hyperlink text to the destination page’s heading that you are directing them to
Include a search box next to the “top nav,” so visitors can search by keywords.
Limit the number of navigation options on each page

Don’t use JavaScript – especially Flash. Many mobile phones can’t see it.
Use descriptive, non-deceptive keywords for the anchor text and page name so that visitors get what they expect when clicking on a hyperlink
Include more detailed navigation in the footer of your site that is also on every page. There should always be a link to a relevant site map here as well