Ever traveled to an unknown place without a map? Where signboards are hard to read and signposts are non existent? Where there is no way to tell where you are and where you’re going? That would have been truly traumatic!

Very much the same thing happens when you land on a website and there’s just no means of navigation around it; no way of telling where you are, where you can go and how you can get there. Once you get off you wouldn’t ever want to go there again.

You can understand how visitors would want to move about and explore your website and you can therefore see how important the ability to navigate from one page to another is to the success of your website. It is therefore up to you to ensure that your website’s navigation system is an excellent ‘road map’ for your visitors.

Your navigation system lets your visitors know exactly what they can expect from your website and if they are going to get what they are looking for, so the better featured it is the more they will be encouraged to explore the site. You also need to have links that take a visitor to documents that can be downloaded from your site as also to other related websites on the net.

In order for this to happen every page of your website should have some of these navigation elements.

First of all, it is   necessary that you have a link to your homepage from anywhere on the site. With its help a visitor can return to the homepage no matter how far they have gone into the site. They can also use it to return once they have gone where they wanted to. Take care to see that if your homepage link is a logo or a graphic it is at the top in the left hand corner.

You could also have a ‘breadcrumb trail’ which is a chain of links showing the structure of your site. It allows people who may have got ‘lost’ in your site to navigate by following the path and retracing their steps back to the homepage. It is usually placed at the top of a page, too.

You can have all your links collected as a navigation bar along the top, bottom or side of your page, but any page on your site must be consistent with it and must be easily accessible through it with the minimum of clicks.

Some web owners may prefer to present their links as tabs which are also easy to follow.

The common default link (usually underlined in blue) is a commonly used navigation element.

You could also have a site map which is a page, listing in detail the different divisions and the web pages on your site.

Another means of navigation is through the drop down menu. As a visitor sets his mouse over a menu item another menu with the pages related to that menu is revealed. It is not as popular as some of the other navigation elements, though, as search engines may not be able to read their contents.

The odds are against your site being the only one visited by people and as they navigate different sites they encounter the same navigational features in several of them, thus giving rise to confidence from a sense of familiarity. Your visitors, therefore, will feel more at home in your site if they encounter the same familiar navigation element. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to try out any new ideas as well. -They should prove to be interesting!

In your enthusiasm to facilitate navigation however, take care that you do not go overboard and provide too many links which may only confuse or intimidate a visitor. Most visitors know exactly what they are looking for and would appreciate it if they could go straight to it. So remember ‘less is more’ and select your navigation system carefully.