Improving Your Site's Navigation

In order to make it big in the web, you need to have a good website

. And the key to a good website is having a good web design. However, a good web design is not just about having eye catching pages. In fact, there is more to web design than just choosing colors and pictures.

One of the more important issues that a web designer need to consider is usability. After all, even with all those fancy features, users will likely never go back to your site again if they end up scratching their heads and not knowing where to go. Thus, you really need to put a lot of attention on making your site as usable as possible.

Navigation is, perhaps, the most important aspect of usability. Your users need to know where they are supposed to go next. Thus, you need to clearly show them the way by making your navigation buttons visible. Often a plain text link will be more than appropriate for a navigation button. But if you prefer a fancier set of buttons, you need to make sure that the text in it is readable.

And since the topic about navigation buttons have already been touched, you also need to make sure that these buttons should tell the user exactly where they are supposed to lead into. So, when labeling your navigation buttons, you need to be clear with them. Also, avoid just generic labels, like page 1 and page 2, instead you need to be descriptive about the page that the link goes into. On the other hand, if you are going for icons as navigation buttons, then you also need to be clear as to what these are supposed to be and where they are supposed to go.

Once you get your users in to your pages, you also need to show them the way out. Thus, aside from your navigation menus, you also need to provide your users with additional links that will lead them to the other areas of your pages, as well as back to the previous pages. Place these in appropriate locations, such at the side or at the bottom of the page. You can also put navigation links in the content. Just make sure that this is in fact related to the actual content and not just a blatant go to this page message.

In order to make sure that everything is in working order, you need to test your site thoroughly. And this doesn't mean just one browser. Keep in mind that people use many different browsers, so you need to make sure that your site displays properly in all of them. Also, you need to do checks on different operating systems.

However, the real test of your website's usability lies in the users themselves. So be ready for all the comments and use these to further refine you site's design.

by: Hazelle Parker

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