Web Site Navigation Design
Advanced Web Design: Tasks | Teaching guide | Resources

Introduction

Navigation elements (buttons, links, instructions) help visitors to your site find their way around. As with other design considerations, consistency is the prime factor in navigation design. Put your buttons, links, etc in the same place on all the pages of your web site or, if you must move them, put them in predictable places.

The overall design of a navigation scheme should reflect the decisions that were made about the organization of the web site. Build in navigational elements that will naturally lead visitors to navigate the site in the way that you intended. It might be important that your students progress through your curriculum web in a predetermined order; it might be better to let the learner choose where to go in completing a learning activity.

Further Reading

Effective Website Navigation - a series of articles from jw web design
http://www.jwweb.com/20010114.html

1. Navigation Theory
2. Applying Organizational Theory
3. Graphical vs. Textual Navigation
4. Facilitating "Deep" Navigation
5. Navigation Tool Tips

Designing Site Navigation
an article from dmitry's design lab
http://www.webreference.com/dlab/9705/

Web Navigation: How to Make your Web Site Fast and Usable
W. Eugene Tiller & Phillip Green AMS Center for Advanced Technologies
http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/hfweb/proceedings/tiller-green/

Web Site Navigation is Useful
Adam Baker's theory column for June 4, 2001
http://www.merges.net/theory/20010604.html

Intuitive Website Navigation
an article from Graphic Goo, an online newsletter for web graphic designers
http://www.graphicgoo.net/june02/june02c.htm