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Website Navigation Tips and Best Practices

Website navigation is a mighty tool that helps your website to complete a number of improtant tasks. First of all it provides aesthetic qualities of the UI and creates pre-conditions for positive or negative UX of your website. Secondly well-thought website navigation is a hidden marketing trick that influences a lot on conversion rates. Perfect navigation must be intuitive and simple but it is not that easy to create design that would have such navigation system.

Actually there are many various techniques and methods that would help designer to create a really unique and efficient navigation. The main trick here is not to confuse a visitor and be sure that your solution can be clearly understand by anyone. So your navigation must be user-centered because any website must sale, deliver information or simply interact users and engage them to make some actions. Now let’s explore some techniques that might help you to improve your website navigation as same as UX.

Menu Subtitles

Adding subtitles to the main navigation menu has became popular technique and we must admit that it gives some amazing results in the process of improvong your websote’s navigation. First of all it gives great aesthetic value that would be noticed and appreaciated by your visitors. Secondly it makes your navigation more usable and adds extra information. It means that you can put in subtitles either your sub-categories or more descrptive information about this category.

Block navigation

Block navigation or useful functional blocks are often used by web designers for creating simple and efficient navigation menus. Frankly speaking this technique’s aim is to unite all important elements in one block and visually connect it with other elements on the page such as the header etc.

Drop-down menus

This old but powerful tehcnique still reminds us that you should never forget about old school tricks. Opposite the subtitles drop-down menus appear after clicking on it some may find this not very user-friendly. We believe that drop-downs are great because most of the users are familiar with this technique and they are intuitively know what’s behind this one click.

Creative Footers

Putting navigation links into the footer is a very successful technique approved by many web design experts. Usually footer is the boring area with few links about copyright and other “useful” stuff. Users often get caught by question “What should I do now?” while scrolling down the footer and in this case navigation menu will engage them to go further and get to some other pages of your website. It is very informative, creative and popular.

Icons

Putting icons into the navigation menus helps you to grab user’s attention and of course make navigation links more descriptive and informative. You’ll agree that imagery stimulates users more efficiently than simple texts. Don’t forget that along with the visually appealing icons you should also use some extra effects like the background color, fonts etc.

Pointers

You can focus user’s attention by adding pointers to your navigation elements. Together with hover effects pointers improve your UI and adding some extra bonuses to your website’s positive UX level. Pointers are helping to build some extra intertaction between a user and navigation elements.