How to create a good navigation for my website?

This is a common question of many website owners. As we know, navigation is one of the most important elements of every websites. A good navigation will help your visitors can easily to surf and find what they want on your site. It also brings a good user experience.

However, in order to design a good navigation, there are some challenges that designers need to deal with. This article will sums up some principles to follow for good website navigation.

1) Distinct

The primary principle is about the distinct of elements. The elements should be separated and easy to locate. Should use the different colors, sizes or fonts for the text of navigation; they should be distinguished from the body text. For the buttons of menu, the contrasting colors and legible text will make it easily to catch.

2) Simple

The navigation was created to help visitors to quickly locate the available stuff, so if you create a complex menu and make them think that it’s hard to find anything, you are likely to lose them. The K.I.S.S principle of design will be useful in this case – Keep It Simple, Stupid as simple things can be easily understood by anyone.

3) Uniformity

The interface of navigation should synchronize in all pages of your site. A break in consistency may make users think that they strayed into another site. You should provide visitors a consistent order without making them feel confused.

4) Standard

Don’t ever use the uncommon or strange navigation forms if you’re not completely confident about that. When you use the common structure which already familiar with people, it will be much easier to understand and use. If you want to create something new, you should still follow the basic structure.

5) Clarity

The clarity of menu contents will help visitors can use your navigation easier. Keep these terms simple and obvious. They come to find what they want, not to resolve a puzzle. So, putting the thing straightforward will be great, the windiness will only bring the bad user experience.

6) Succinct

Don’t add too many things into the main menu, it it will distract the attention of visitors. A better idea is you can add numerous links into the vertical navigation. You should focus on the prominent links and drive the user attention into that, don’t split up the attention of them with the unimportant elements.

7) Interactive

Your navigation should have an indication of the action every time the visitors hover or click on the menu items. The difference can be indicated through a different background or colour of the page. It will show to visitors where they are hovering on.

8) Organised

You should organise your menu items by a reasonable way. For instance, the most important items should be displayed in the first place of navigation bar and least important in the middle. People usually pay attention to the position on the top or at the bottom. So, the standard location for “Contact” is in the end of the menu bar.

9) Style

Minimalism now is a huge trend of web design; the design of navigation is aiming to the simplest layout. You can create a cool looking navigational menu in order to bring a pleasurable user experience, but make sure that the style matches to the website’s theme.

10) Well-Structured

For a good navigation, the structure is very important. You need to figure out the prominent features and the purpose that you want to reach. Prepare an information hierarchy; you need to know what’s important and what’s less important. Organising the content and make navigations its reflection could be the best solution.

Conclusion:

Above are 10 principles that I think they are important to have a good navigation. However, still have many more aspects that have impact on your navigation like accessibility, responsiveness, visibility, animations, flawlessness, scalability etc… Keep testing and tweaking out the improvement areas through analytics. Keep in mind that it should be tested before launching in live site.

In this article, I’m very happy to share with you a useful solution to create a powerful navigation on your store. That is Magento Mega Menu Extension , this extension was developed to help all Magento website owners can create a good website menu. Beside many great features, this extension also come with a clean and beautiful design, it has been optimized for the best performance. You can install and use this extension easily even you don’t know any code lines. You can find more info about this extension at:

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