Website navigation is a key element to help visitors browse your site easily. As the gateway to different areas within your website, navigation design should give users a sense of orientation. Having an effective navigation design with perfect functionality will make the website easy to navigate, as well as ensure visitors a better user experience.
There are various ways to present your website navigation options. Types including top horizontal bar navigation, vertical bar/sidebar navigation, tabs navigation, breadcrumb navigation, tags navigation, search navigation, drop-down menu/ fly-out menu navigation, footer navigation and etc are all common use navigation designs. Whatever type you use, your navigation design should be eye-catching and aim to leading users to what they are looking for. In this case, you need to follow some rules while designing your website navigation.
5 Tips of Effective Website Navigation Design
As the roadmap to guide website visitors, website navigation design plays a crucial part in influencing the viewer’s preference. So how do you ensure that your users are able to quickly and easily find the information they need? Here are 5 tips to follow to design your website navigation effectively.
Keep it simple
If your website has a large amount of content, visitors are easy to get stuck. To avoid such confusion, the website navigation should be clean and straightforward for users to find information they want fast. In this case, you need to remove all the obstacles that may impede your users, and keep the text in the navigation bar precise and recognizable without long phrases.
This is the home page navigation design of Fundo los paltos. Here on this website, the navigation design is functional and simple without any unnecessary words, presenting visitors the most relevant products or sections clearly.
Maintain the consistent
Another important tip to keep in mind is the consistent of your navigation design. The website navigation should be placed in the same location on every web page. And the design should be kept in the same color, style and type. If your website navigation are designed to jump from the left to right or change in colors while visitors browsing your site, it will make your visitors feel frustrated. Moreover, consistency for classification is also very critical for successful navigation.
Take the navigation design of Keith cakes as an example. Whatever page you go, the site navigation will maintain the same as the home page design, including the location, the color and the style.
Give some context
The clear and unambiguous navigation design will remind readers where they are and where they are going. The way to achieve this is to create classifications with links to the homepage as well as to change the color of the link when the mouse rolls over. That is to say, the classification name of the page the reader arrives in should be highlighted in a different form from the others.
The navigation design on the site of Delibar applies this approach perfectly. When visitors turn to another classification, the button features a subtle JavaScript effect that smoothly moves it up in a different color and size.
Make it Eye-catching
Your website navigation is designed for readers. It should be attractive to draw their attention. Once visitors like your navigation design, they are willing to use the navigation to meet their needs. Website displaying creativity in their navigation has large impact on the visual design and display of you website. However, you need to make the appealing visual elements consistent with the functionality.
Alexarts features a beautiful background of a city panorama. The catchy navigation is designed in large bubbles pointing to different scenes. Apart from this, when visitors hover over a navigation bubble, it jumps upward slightly. Such creative and interactive design makes the navigation very impressive.
Don’t overwhelm
Do you know that giving visitors too many choices may lead to bad usability? Visitors are not as patient as you think, they will not hang around a site very long if they can’t make a choice easily. To most websites, five to seven channel items are enough, which fits nicely in the width and enables readers to navigate further into your site. What’s more, all your navigation option should be as accessible as possible. Remember not to design your navigation with too many special effects with Flash or JavaScript.
BonLook makes a good example of a clean and simple navigation design. The illustrated drop-down menu with simple pictograms allows customers to choose their desired glasses by shapes easier.
Showcase of 20 Awesome Website Navigation Examples
Well, not all the good site navigations follow the principles mentioned above, but I do think they are the basics. Below I also collected 20 cool website navigation examples not only to inspire you but also show you how to put these tips into practical use. We hope you like this showcase. Enjoy!
1. Mellasat
2. Doopsuiker poppies
3. yodaa
4. Tvrdek
5. Helmy bern
6. Fabrica de caricaturas
7. Bay realty
8. Get me fast
9. Creative spaces
10. Global creative designs
11. Water snip
12. Skialpine
13. C&C coffee
14. Design zoom
15. Ole chef
16. Alesandro giammaria
17. Biola
18. Cognigen corp
19. York dale
20. The creative dot
What Do You Think?
Designing good website navigation really needs your efforts. You need to evaluate your web content thoroughly and try to give an enjoyable experience for your users. Hope this article has inspired you to create awesome navigation designs in your future projects. Feel free to share other website navigation tips and examples with us in the comment section below. Thanks!
