The key part of an attractive layout is navigation
The basic task of navigation is to provide the user with answers to the following questions:
- Where am I?
- Where can I go?
- How can I get there?
- How can I get back to the place I have already been in?
- Where have I already been?
Main menu
Menu is nothing else but a list which gives the user all possible navigation options of a given application. Menus can be placed in different positions, however they are most often found at the top of the site, as a navigation bar, and on the left -hand side. A blog schema, where a right-column layout is used, is becoming more popular now, with a such widgets as a calendar, archive or blogroll situated on the right.
Bookmarks
A bookmark can be defined as a saved address for a web page (link) stored on a computer so that a user can easily return to the site they have already visited. Its function is thus similar to a real life bookmark used by a reader to mark a place in a book. It is worth using bookmarks when:
- A number of categories does not exceed nine but it is not more than seven,
- The scenarios for using the site are so different that there is a need to separate them (for instance, bank websites have separate bookmarks for individual clients and businesses),
- The website is used for e-commerce and the products are clearly categorised forming separate sets (books, games, music).
Cascading (Drop down) menu
Cascading menus are very popular all over the world wide web. Many web applications use them extensively and they are very successful. Their main task is to show the user other options (also in form of menus) while they hold the cursor over one of the main menu’s items. Despite their popularity, cascading menus are often criticised for performing well only within desktop applications (such as MS Word for instance).
The advantage of cascading menus lies in showing the contents of a given website by simply hovering the cursor over the main menu. This makes navigation quite simple and fast as the pages in the selected sections appear dynamically.
The basic disadvantage of cascading menus, however, is connected with their construction. Ill-programmed menus cause a lot of problems for the user – they might confuse them as it is not always obvious whether the user should click on the menu or simply move the cursor over it.
Breadcrumbs
The name of this method of navigating the content of the website comes from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, where the characters were dropping breadcrumbs to mark the path they had travelled. The same technique is used in websites.
The main function of breadcrumbs is to give the user links back to each previous page they have visited, thus allowing the user to find their way back throughout the site to the starting point. Breadcrumbs are usually situated on top of the page under title bars and they often use a greater-than sign or a colon to separate the pages.
The structure of breadcrumbs looks as follows: Home page > Section page > Subsection page…
or Home page : Section page : Subsection page …
Tag Cloud
Tags are single keywords which best characterise an article or a web page. They are mainly introduced to help users to look for relevant information. The importance of each tag is emphasised by their visual representation - font size and colour - where more important words are bigger or darker. A tag cloud contains a collection of tags for the given page, often presented in a form of a box.
Tags are a relatively new solution in making the navigation more visual and they first gained popularity at the beginning of 21st century, introduced as a navigation aid in a photo sharing website Flickr. They may be cleverly used, for instance, with a search engine, where they will create a list of words that are most frequently searched.
Ask your web developer for more information or contact us if you need any help with preparing a professional website.
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