The website navigation is the practice of people moving from one web page to another. The website navigation includes links, labels and certain other things that provide access to other pages. Here are reasons that explain why it is important to create the best navigation designs.
Access to Information
Every visitor enters a website in search of good information. A good navigation design links content among the web pages. Here are certainuser-friendly navigation designs.
- The search model in the navigation design allows users to fetch the required information quickly.
- The structural browser model website navigation provides set of links in the sides of web pages. This design provides additional information to the user. It increases page views and eventually increases the site traffic.
- The footer navigation menu (includes terms of condition, copyright) is placed in the bottom of the page. This is because, the user has not come to the site to access this content. It is of least importance to the users.
Bottomline, it is important to focus on website navigation in order tohelp the users to access the required information in short duration of time.
Location
Navigation shows location. While navigating through the site users have to know, what is here? where is he? where can he go from here? Such information is provided by the navigation menu.
Aboutness of the Site
The website navigation provides the complete length and breadth of the site information. It creates coherence of the content and creates expectations among users. When the user is on the site to learn about one thing, he gets curious to learn about the other (looking at the navigation menu). This way his interest in the content offered by the website increases. This helps in fetching more traffic.
Brand
The website navigation helps to promote the brand. For instance, main navigation menu of a tennis tournament event website can be presented in spinning circle.
Site Credibility
A good website navigation increases the credibility of the site. In simple words, it increases the believability. If the navigation menu is not placed in right order or is inaccessible, the visitors are discouraged to move further in the site. Also, the unorderly look of the site does not provide a good environment to read and learn about the content. It forces the user to leave the site very quickly even if the content is good! Therefore, it is important to focus on website navigation designs.
Importance
The information in the website is useless if it is not arranged properly. Also, it is useless when it cannot be found. There is no use in spending money making information without knowing how -or even if- it is used. Thus, it is important to create good website navigation designs.
The return on investment for site navigation is high. One has to spend few minutes in arranging things and the result is huge. Ultimately it increases traffic. On the other hand, a poor navigation increases cost of support. It devalues the brands.
People come to the site in search of answers. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the website hosts to provide the right content at the right place! This is achieved by good website navigation design and therefore it is important!
