Website navigation: An essential guide

Website navigation is the backbone of user experience. Without it, web surfers would be lost. Here are a few tips to get it right.

by Natko Radmilovic - Art Director
Website navigation: An essential guide

Website navigation: An essential guide

Your website is like a metropolitan city; it should be planned and designed strategically so that people don’t feel lost. When it comes to website navigation, your sitemap and structure matter a lot. Everything from menus to icons, headers to footers, acts as the blueprint of your website navigation, steering visitors from one page to the next.
That being said, let’s dive deeper into this guide and try to understand how to make website navigation easy and straightforward. Here are some good practices suggested by a leading design agency in Melbourne.

1. Make navigation elements obvious

Being creative is great, but not at the expense of usability, functionality and user experience. Navigation elements must be obvious and predictable. It is pointless to create a well-structured navigation menu if it is not visible in your web design in Werribee. Thus, place menus, links, buttons and other navigation elements prominently on your website, where people expect to find them.

2. Keep navigation consistent

Be consistent while formatting and creating your navigation interface. Say your homepage has black and underlined links, then the same should be applied to all your navigation links throughout your website. Otherwise, visitors will get confused between hyperlinked text and navigation menus. You can consider hiring photography and videography services if you want to include consistent visual elements in your website navigation.

3. Be descriptive

Your visitors should be confident enough to click any link present on your website. If they aren’t sure, your website navigation isn’t good enough. Visitors should know where they will end up after clicking a link. This is where you need to make your website navigation descriptive. According to an experienced team of UI/UX designers in Melbourne, your links and buttons should include the title, summary and the description of what visitors can do on the page.

4. Design for every mobile screen size

If your website navigation isn’t responsive, you’re in trouble. As the number of mobile users is accounting for over half of the worldwide web traffic, it’s more important than ever to optimise your website for different mobile phones. Everything from navigation menus to links should work well on different screen sizes. Also, decide what navigation features, such as a hamburger button, are important for mobile devices.

5. Make hypertext visible

If visitors can’t tell a hyperlink from body copy, how will they step ahead and take desired actions on that website? It is one of the most common navigation mistakes, allowing the web design to get in the way of usability. Make your menu options as clear as possible, without hindering your website usability. Make hypertext obvious by separating it from other elements on the page. You can format it in a contrasting colour or just underline it.

 

In conclusion

When you carefully design your website navigation, you are most likely to achieve your business goals like delivering a great user experience and improving usability. The key is to help visitors understand the relationship among your webpages and assist them in their browsing journey, rather than making them exit your website in frustration. Add, edit and adjust navigation elements that will improve the user experience. And don’t be afraid to make changes.

To get a clear idea of streamlined navigation, feel free to take a look at our recent work – Roxburgh Park Central.

 

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