Navigation
Navigation is how the users find their way around on the internet. If users can't find what they want on your website, you might as well have no website at all.
1. Help users finding your website
- Guessing the domain name
- Many users try go guess the domain name of a website. The first guess may
be www.companyname.com, or www.companyname.dk, if in Denmark. You may
register more than one domain name in order to cover everything that users
may guess at, including common misspellings of your name. The URL should
work both with and without the initial www.
The domain name should of course be easy to remember. A name containing a hyphen (-) is not the best, because users may forget the hyphen or put a dot instead.
- Search engines
- Make sure your website is easy to find with the most popular search
engines. It is possible to control which pages on your website are found by
the search engines and how they are described in the search result listing.
It is also possible to add keywords that are visible to the search engines
but not seen by the user. You may add such keywords to cover all synonyms
for the topic of your website, including common misspellings. Technical
instructions.
Be aware that users may arrive at any subpage in your system. Make sure that all subpages have a title that makes sense out of context and a link back to the main entry page.
- Links from other sites
- Other people are likely to make links from their sites to your site only
if your site contains useful information. The higher the quality of the
information on your site, the more incoming links you will get.
Make sure your site has logical entry points that others can link to. A
subpage within a frame cannot be linked to.
Be careful to avoid dead links. Whenever you reorganize your website and remove a page or change its filename, you may actually be breaking a link from some other site, or making somebody's bookmark invalid. To minimize this problem, you have to put a redirection page where the old page was.
2. Help users find their way around on your website
- Menus
- All pages should have a menu. Make sure your menus or links look like
menus or links. If your links just look like text or decoration, then users
may never get the idea that they can click on them. By default, links are
underlined and blue or purple: Blue for places where you haven't been, and
purple for links to pages that you have already visited. The more your
design deviates from this standard, the more difficult it will be for users
to navigate.
Menus should be structured in a logical way, and not too deeply nested. Users may never find a particular page if they can't guess which way to go to find it, or if they don't know that it's available.
- Search facilities
- A search facility can be very useful for a site that has many pages. But
good search facilities are difficult to make. An effective way of testing
your search facility is to log search misses. Looking at the logfile, you
can see all the terms that users have searched for without success.
- Filename navigation
- Some users are using the URL field in their browser for navigation.
Therefore, the directory structure and filenames should preferably be simple
and structured in a consistent and logical way. For
example, if the URL of this page is
- www.eit.ihk-edu.dk/subjects/mmi/technical/webnavigation.php
- www.eit.ihk-edu.dk/subjects/mmi/technical
- www.eit.ihk-edu.dk/subjects/mmi
- www.eit.ihk-edu.dk/subjects
- www.eit.ihk-edu.dk
- Helpful error messages
- Don't let your system write HTTP Error 404 when a requested page is not found. Rather, you should show a helpful page with links to your index page and search facilities and possibly a list of options that resemble what the user has typed.
3. Help users finding their way out of your website
Some websites have no outgoing links. Such sites are called sticky, because they are trying to keep the user within their site. But a user who can't find what (s)he is looking for on your site and can't get help finding it elsewhere, is not a happy user who wants to come back another time.
This page was last modified 2008-Dec-08