There are plenty of views of best practices for page navigation in your web site design. But there should be two main aims of getting your page navigation correct – allowing visitors to find their way quickly and simply round the web site and allowing the search engines to find all relevant pages of your web site.

If you only have a small web site, half a dozen pages or so, then it is quite simple to display links to all of your pages on every page. But even then, there are mistakes that people can make so do read on!

Keep the main navigation constant
And the first of these is changing the navigation layout on every page. If the navigation structure changes on every page it could be very distracting to the traffic. For instance, dropping the existing page from the collection of links could alter the layout of the links across the screen and if a visitor is working left to right through the links that can cause them to get lost.

Do not hide in text links
Links in text are also open to major problems. I have seen sites in which these links are in exactly the same font, text decoration and size as the rest of the text. This is a pity as visitors on the web site will not realise that they can click a link for further information unless by a few fluke they happen to drop the mouse more than the hidden link.

Always have text links
I am not saying that all links must be text links, but if you are using flash, javascript or image links then at the footer of the page add text link equivalents to the pages that you are linking to. This makes sure that visitors using browsers that could not read these technologies, as for instance disabled and basic phone browsers, still have the option for the links as do search engines.

Give a link back home
Quite often someone finding a page on your website will want to go to your home page before continuing through the website, or another reader may be deep into the web site and want to get to your home page. So be sure that this link is clear and simple to find.

Leave breadcrumbs
If you have a website of just a few pages then maybe not needed, but if traffic can click down through several levels of pages then telling them where they are is a must. The breadcrumbs would as a rule provide another link to the home page and the pages above the existing page. For example, on an ecommerce website they may list home page, category page, sub category page and then display the existing page name for confirmation.

Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a Merseyside web design service. For more useful tips, call into the website design blog.

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