Don’t Ruin Your Smashing Web Design with Poor Navigation

Are you ruining your web design with poor navigation?

Veronica Davis is a freelance writer for businesses online. She writes for and helps businesses ranging from New York web design firms to real estate sites. Navigation is an important element of any web design. Veronica shows us the importance of good navigation in your web design.  Join in the awesome guest blogging club and take a look at our guest blogging guidelines.

How many times have you landed on a site, and you couldn’t find exactly what you were looking for and hit the back button? Whether it was a famous New York web design company or your brother’s best friend that did the design, they messed up by not making navigation a priority. They lost you as a reader, potential client or possible customer. While it may not be the most exciting aspect of web design, it is very much an important one. Any web design that doesn’t make use of easy and effective navigation will only cost you money in the long run.

Yes, there are countless ways that you can set up the navigation on your new site. While you certainly want to customize the navigation to your site’s design, you gotta realize that most sites do have a navigation structure that’s pretty similar. You don’t want to be too different. You don’t want your visitors to land on your page and not be able to figure out how to get to what they’re looking for. The gorgeous design isn’t going to be enough to keep them on your site if they can’t figure out your navigation structure quickly. No matter what kind of navigation your final web design will include, try to make sure that any destination on your site is within three clicks for your readers. This is the traditional “3 Click Rule”
While a poorly designed navigation structure will quickly turn visitors away, a good one will keep them on your site longer. That means more readers, more subscribers, more sales or more leads…whichever it is that you’re after.

Clearly, that’s a Link

Links should look like links. They shouldn’t look like the rest of the text on the page. They shouldn’t be hidden or hard to find. Of course, there will be sometimes when links that don’t look like links are effective and it fits in with your site’s design. If you’re going to do something like this, you need to make it very clear to any visitor.  Exactly where the links are and how to get around your site.

Consistency

Keep the navigation structure the same throughout your site. Never think that each page or each section should get its own web design and structure. It will only confuse your visitors, quickly sending them elsewhere to find the information that they were looking for.

Quick Links

There are many ways today to make the navigation on your site attractive, whether it’s with CSS, JQuery or something else. But there are a few links that should always be prominent and easy to find without having to use drop-downs, slide-outs or other fancy navigation. A good web design will always make it easy for the user to go the last page they were on and to get to the index or home page. Usually, you want to include a “back” button on each page and link your logo to the main page on your site.