Navigation
Navigation determines how your clients travel from one part of your website to another, for example: from your "home" page to your "about us" page. A good pre-planned navigation system allows free travel and avoids "dead ends" that can frustrate visitors.
Most navigation plans fall into two general schemes: horizontal or vertical. Horizontal navigation is what you see above (the blue "Photography", "Graphic Design" and "Web Design" buttons above). Horizontal navigation is "usually" placed near the top of the page, often (as above) directly under the company name/letterhead. Vertical navigation typically runs down the left side of a site. Either type of navigation can be single level (all pages are always displayed) or they can be multi-level (some pages are only shown if you hover over a category). In general, single level navigation is easiest for the customer, but very limiting on a larger site. Multi-level navigation requires a bit more thought from your customer, but allows much larger sites. You can see examples below. Please contact us at 805-577-6914 or use our .
There are four primary website navigation styles:
Horizontal Single Level Info
The example mini-site below shows a "horizontal single level" navigation. Everything except the navigation in this example site has been deliberately "grayed out" to emphasize the navigation.
This example shows a relatively small site, 5 basic pages. Each page is always shown, so your customer has easy and quick access to any page at any time. The limitation with this navigation style shows up if your site grows. Imagine this site with 10 or 20 pages. That is a lot of buttons!
Larger sites will probably want to use "horizontal multiple level" navigation. That is what we use throughout our site (see the blue "Photography", "Graphic Design" and "Web Design" navigation near the top of our pages). Notice that in order to get to this page, you probably selected the "Web Design" navigation which gave you a drop down menu including "Site Option" which gave you another drop down menu leading to this page (Navigation). Certainly not as quick or client friendly as the 5 page "horizontal single level" example below, but our site has 52 primary pages.
While the example below uses a "wood grain" background for the buttons and Tahoma as the button font, these are only two of many options.
