One of the most important elements of web design is navigation.

 

Navigation in web sites can often be confusing for site visitors. This is often due to the developer’s Lack of understanding of the average web site user. You see, the developer knows where everything is in the site, but visitors do not.

 

Fortunately, in WEBPLUS navigation has been made simple with pre-designed navigation bars (both horizontal and vertical varieties). By placing a navigation bar on your master pages. You will ensure that visitors know exactly where to find the navigation element on every page. But, there are a few tricks you can use to improve the look and feel of the WEBPLUS navigation elements.

 

All navigation elements can be customized by right-clicking the element and editing the navigation bar. You can change background colour, text colour, over colour and font style quite easily. However, it’s usually best to leave the scheme manager to apply the colours set up in your web site pallet. This helps to make your site look more uniform.

 

Some people often ask if the font size can be changed as most of the WEBPLUS navigation elements use quite a large font size. This is one option that isn’t available in the edit navigation bar dialog, although you can change the font style if you wish. The best way to resize the fonts is to simply resize the whole navigation element by dragging one of its corner handles. This scales everything nicely.

 

Try and keep your main navigation bars to about 6 or 7 items.  These should be links to main subject areas of your site. Its a bit like the table of contents in a book. Unfortunately, some web site developers try and make the navigation into a complete site index!

 

If you need to have direct links to sub-pages, its best to make those pages into child pages of the main topic page. For example, you may have a main topic page named Products. You could then have child pages named something like TV’s, DVD’s, Audio Systems and Accessories. By making these pages child pages of the main product page, you have the option of including the child pages in your navigation bar as drop-down menus that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over the main products link. But even this can create confusion, and isn’t always a good idea.

 

The reason being that people may be tempted to simply go directly to, say, your DVD page, and thus you miss the opportunity of presenting a sales pitch for your whole product range.  It’s often better to force visitors to your product page first where you can make a complete product presentation - showing people how well your products integrate with each other, and showing pictures of your products working together in real environments. You can then create a text sub menu on your products page that leads people into your individual product group pages.

 

Text menus are quite important to use as sub-menus. Firstly, because they are easy to create, secondly, because they are not graphics and therefore do not conflict with more important graphics on your page. Lastly, they’re important because they can be more easily picked-up by search engines. But, whichever type of sub-menu you choose to use, try and ensure the sub-menus are positioned in the same place on every page where they are used.

 

We’ve used this type of navigation structure on this site. We’ve used the main navigation element to direct visitors to broad subject categories, and then presented text sub menu choices on each main topic page.

 

If you use this technique. Don’t forget to EXCLUDE your child pages from the main site navigation.

 

On a final note, always ensure that you have some sort of link back to your sub menus. Even better, use I-frames to bring your child pages into view (as in this site). This will ensure that your sub-menus always remain visible - allowing visitors to quickly move from one sub-page to the next.