Menus or Navigation for Your Website

My colleague Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue recently tweeted about menus and navigation: "Think 'navigation' -- specific ways of getting to a destination. 'Menus' allow people to get lost by their own choices."
People in the trade don't usually talk about menus (except in restaurants, natch), but actually lots of our clients do -- and maybe you do. The very idea of a menu brings to mind a lavish array of items to choose from... do you want to begin with caviar with creme fraiche, you can ask yourself, or perhaps the caviar blini... Let's look at the wine list while we're deciding...

Wrong mindset for web design. People don't sit back in a happy, considering frame of mind and read through all the delectable options on the homepage before choosing the most appealing among them. They don't enjoy sampling a variety of possibilities before settling in to savor the page that sounds most enticing. They really don't like clicking back and forth in search of something, as people might share bites of an appetizer at a restaurant.

Nope. Most people who go to your website want something. They want the answer to a question, a solution for a problem, or a specific piece of information. Maybe even a bit of entertainment and inspiration, but they still want to find it quickly.

In a meeting today, a client spoke bitterly of websites that don't take that into account. "Don't make me search for things!" she said. Her expression was that of someone who had taken a bite of caviar without realizing what she was getting herself into -- expecting berries, perhaps, rather than the delicate globes of fish eggs.

Give up the idea of menus for your website and think in terms of navigation. It could make all the difference.

Website Checkup: the Navigation

Navigation is extremely important to the success of your website. Here are some simple rules to use to check the navigation at your site:

• Have some navigation. The pre-redesign homepage above gives no clues, on this full-screen shot, about the structure of the site. As far as the visitor can tell, it's just one page.

• Put it where people expect to see it. The page above does have some navigation buttons, in the lower right hand corner. People expect to see the navigation across the top or vertically along the side, where you can see there is none.

• Make it look like navigation. There are lots of links in the sample above; the links going to the main pages of the site don't look different from the links that go offsite. In the example below, the links are a collection of icons -- it takes an extra step to figure out that they are in fact the navigation bar.

• Offer a reasonable number of choices. Five to seven navigation buttons are plenty. Ten buttons isn't navigation. Even if you have hundreds or thousands of pages, organize them into fewer choices and let people choose a path to the information they need. They'd rather do that than read through long lists.

Here are a couple of good examples:




The example above is fancier than the one below, but both of them do their jobs.





So for today, ask yourself whether your navigation looks more like the good examples or the bad examples. If you recognize elements of your site in the "befores" then it's time for a navigation makeover.