Website Fundamentals: Consistent Navigation and Layout

Last month, we wrote about the first steps to starting your own website: setting up hosting, leasing a domain name, and producing content.  Now let’s talk further about this last part: producing the content.

When planning your website content, it’s important to plan it using the principles of user-centered design.  This means thinking through the mindset of your target audience and planning your site according to what is important and useful to them — not what is interesting to you.  You’re creating it for other people to see, after all, not yourself.  Over our next few articles, we will discuss the following website usability principles:

1. Provide consistent navigation and layout
2. Focus on the users’ needs
3. Keep it short and sweet

Provide consistent navigation and layout:

This may sound like common sense, but travelling between web pages isn’t like travelling between places on physical land, where you can see your destination approaching in front of you and your starting point slowly receding behind you.  Rather, it’s more like teleporting — you leave your starting point and instantly arrive at your destination, with no sense of distance, location, or relationship to surrounding areas.  Clicking a link between two pages on the same site is exactly the same as clicking a link between two websites on opposite sides of the planet.  Because of this, consistent navigation and visual design is extremely important.  In fact, outside of the page address in the navigation bar, the site’s visual layout is often the only clue to the visitor that they’re still on the same website.

Here are a few things to remember:

• Keep the primary navigation consistent across every page of your site. If your main navigation is at the top of the page, keep it on the top of every page of your site.  Likewise, if it’s on the left side of your page, keep it on the left side of every page of your site.  Take Amazon.com, for example.  They have a lot of page-specific navigation options on their various pages: customer comment links, related products, product tags, advertisements, etc.  But their primary navigation — search bar, store-wide product directory, shopping cart link, etc. — always stay in the same position at the top of every page.  Consistent primary navigation ensures site users don’t have to re-learn how to use your website on every single page.
• Keep the visual design consistent across your site pages. If a site user is on a page that is minimalist and predominantly blue and white, then clicks on a link and is taken to a page that is busy and loud, filled with red and orange, they will rightly assume that they have been taken to a new website.  If both pages are, in fact, on the same site, it will cause confusion for the user and will break the flow of their browsing, as they try to figure out “where the heck am I now?”  Consistent visual design across all your site pages will reduce the jarring “teleporting” effect on your website users as they browse between your various site pages.

These are some of the concepts behind providing easy-to-use navigation to your site visitors.  In our next two articles, we will talk about the other two website usability principles mentioned above: focusing on the users’ needs, and keeping it short and sweet.  In the meantime, if you have any questions about website design and development, please contact us and we will be glad to help.

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