One of the most important aspects of a website is navigation. It gives a high-level summary of what visitors might expect to see (which also happens to be good for SEO). It assists visitors in orienting themselves so that they can navigate the site easily. It also allows customers to do rapid actions such as viewing their cart or searching the website.
As a Melbourne web designer, you must ensure that the navigation of the website is well-designed so that visitors can get the most out of it. Today, we’ll take a look at five factors to consider while building website navigation.
Sometimes we tend to take website navigation for granted. As a designer, all you need to care about is that it displays at the top of the page, provides connections to your most essential sites, and it looks clean. Right?
No.
Because navigation plays such a vital role, it must be carefully planned. What you need to know is as follows:
Make the logo stand out.
A company’s logo is basically its digital face. It reflects them not just on their website, but also on other platforms such as social media, online forums, email signatures, and so on. As a result, the logo is critical in establishing brand image, trust, and loyalty.
To optimize the logo’s brand-building potential, it must be properly placed, sized, and spaced in the website’s header. The following are some general guidelines to follow:
- Add a link to the Home page from the logo.
- When feasible, put it in the upper-left corner. If you wish to put it in the middle, make sure the top-left corner has a Home link.
- Size it such that every detail is visible and simple to understand. The optimal logo sizes for rectangle logos are 250px x 100px and 160px x 160px for square logos, however it all depends on how much breathing room you want to provide your navigation links.
Without expanding the font size of the header, making the logo much larger would generate too much space around the navigation. As a result, it’s a bit of a balancing act. If you choose a larger logo, be sure it doesn’t take up so much room that your links get lost.
Create a sticky header
Websites frequently have a lot to offer visitors. We build them in parts and with plenty of white space in between to avoid overwhelming users with material that reads like pages from a book or magazine.
As a result, web pages can get rather lengthy. That isn’t the issue, though. Visitors are willing to search over the content as long as it is relevant. The problem is the time it takes to scroll back to the top after they’re done, especially if they’re using a smartphone to browse the site. You can address problem with the sticky header.
Only Use Easily Recognized Icons
In web design, iconography may be quite handy. We usually use it in combination with text labels to visually express or illustrate a concept. However, instead of text labels, we may utilize icons as stand-alone components.
Nonetheless, while employing standalone icons in navigation, designers must be cautious. Only a few dozen symbols are globally recognized, and the majority of them have no place in the navigation. Other navigation symbols are available, however they are often seen on more specialized sites (like ecommerce and international).
Icons may save you a lot of time when it comes to navigating. Just be cautious about which ones you employ. If the majority, if not all, of your visitors are aware of what they are, your navigation may become more difficult to utilize.
Highlight The Current Page
It’s usually good to let visitors know what page they’re on, even if you’re developing a small website. Although the top of the page may provide hints as to their location, a visible marker in the navigation would provide a more immediate reference point. And the sooner they figure out where they are, the more untouched sections of the site they may access.
There are a number of ways to draw attention to a visitor’s current place in the navigation. It all relies on your branding and design aesthetic. You may, for example, change the text color on the current page or add a colored line beneath it.
Organize Mega Menus to Make Them Easy To Read
In general, larger websites take longer to arrange. This thorough approach of organizing must also be reflected in the website navigation. The mega menu has long been the preferred navigation design for websites with many layers of pages and more than a dozen connections. And, as long as it’s well-organized, it’s effective.
You may use design strategies similar to those used to organize web pages to create a mega menu:
- Headers that are bolded
- Pages that are connected to each other are grouped together in columns.
- Images to draw attention to key pages
It’s fine if a mega menu feels too clumsy for your site. Even with a giant menu layout, websites with thousands of pages may be challenging to maintain organized. As an alternative, you may create a more typical single-level navigation and then utilize filters and sorting to transform the search page into a navigational tool.