User-Friendly Websites With Simple Website Navigation

Simple Website Navigation Tips

Whether your website consists of a single page or multiple pages, you need simple and easy-to-use Website navigation system. With your site, you really need to avoid what we call the "sins of website navigation:"

• Using a complicated website navigation device strategy a simple one will do.
• Using inappropriate metaphors as website navigation "controllers." Ersatz radio tuning dials and VCR faceplates are common examples that may have seemed like a good idea at the time but aren't.
• Using any other cumbersome graphics as a website navigation strategy.
• Using cumbersome phrases or industry terminology in your website navigation.
• Using multiple links to get somewhere the user can get with one link or action.
• Having dead-end links. (How many sites have you used where you can't return to the home page or another critical page?)
• Requiring users to pass their mouse over an unlabeled icon (or worse, a blank area of the screen) in order to reveal the website navigation choices.
• Using pop-up windows as website navigation bridges.
• Using Flash or a Java applet to generate the website navigation images after the rest of the page loads.

Website Size & Menus

If your site needs to be a little larger than you want it to be ideally because you have a lot of critical information to display, it's better to have more pages and keep your website navigation system really simple than to try to use fewer pages with a complicated website navigation system.

If your site has enough pages or complexity that it needs a structured website navigation system, a simple menu structure is fine.

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If your site seems small and focused in its structure and organization, it will be easy to use.

• You really need to avoid what we call the "sins of website navigation."
• If your site seems small and focused in its structure and organization, it will be easy to use.

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