I know that designing a website can be pretty exciting, especially when you have so many awesome ideas you want to implement on it. However, you might want to rein in your creative muses and stick to what’s practical at first.
When coming up with a design for your site, one of the first elements you have to consider is your navigation bar. This is where all the major categories of your blog may be found. More importantly, it serves as the doorway and interface to the rest of the pages on your site. Here are a few tips that you might want to consider on how to design a good nav bar:
1. Follow the KISS principle – Keeping it short and simple is still the best way to go, even for your navigation bar. Try not to fit in elaborate headings for each category when a one-word description will suffice. Instead of putting “Latest News”, you can simple settle for “News” for a category heading – a good rule of thumb is 12 characters or less. Keeping things brief will help the readability of your nav bar and not to make it look too crowded by overloading it with too much text.
2. Why won’t anyone think of the spiders? – While you may have a killer nav bar in terms of looks, remember that there’s more to it than have a pretty navigation bar. Try to remember that a site not only has to appeal to visual senses of a human being, but also to the algorithms of a search engine bot. Using a Flash driven nav bar may look pretty, but the spiders might have a tough time reading the text on it.
3. It’s better to be consistent rather than creative – Remember what I said about keeping it simple? I know it might not be easy to contain your excitement sometimes, especially when you have a lot of ideas whizzing through your head about how you want your site to look. Usability and consistency should still take top priority – make sure that your nav bar appears in the exact same place in every page and that any drop down menus are properly lined up with its respective category.
4. Make sure to include visual cues to remind your visitors where they are – This is more applicable if you don’t have too many sub-pages or levels underneath each category in your nav bar. If you do, then it might be better to include a directory or navigation hierarchy running just below the navigation bar, but then again that’s a bit outside the scope of our discussion. In any case, visual cues help track where a visitor is and improve the clarity of each page. A good tip for this is to change the background color of the navigation tab to indicate the current page.
5. Whether horizontal or vertical, remember how the eye moves – Another practical tip is to observe the behavior in which people normally read: from top to bottom, then from left to right. Keep this in mind when you’re trying to decide on either a horizontal or vertical navigation bar. If any of its categories contain any sub-menus, try to keep them in the proper orientation as well. This will enhance the readability of your nav bar greatly.
Well, those are all the tips that I have for you on this subject. On a final note, try to imagine each page which your nav bar directs your visitors to as a landing page where you can push for a possible conversion. This is why it’s important to see that your navigation bar is as user-friendly and as clear as possible to everyone visiting your site. In any case, just remember to keep everything practical and have fun designing!
If you have any questions on how to streamline your nav bar further, feel free to drop a line through the comment section below.
Later,
Andy
