Essential Website Navigation in 2016
Tuesday, January 26, 2016 by Paul Hamilton
Website navigation menus can make or break your website's user experience, which is the primary element in design at all times. The most important service a website designer can provide clients is to insure that the sites built for them boast a stunning and highly functional user experience.
Quality website user experience guarantees that websites get more leads, visitors and readers, not to mention retaining regular visitors. There are so many options and one has great control over website navigation... It is the most important part of creating a site.
While not all developers place a high priority on designing for excellent navigation, which does a disservice to clients, and visitors.
Let's talk about this most basic part of a website design and how to master stellar navigation for your clients' sites.
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Essential Website Navigation in 2016
Sticky Navigation
Sticky navigation is essential to empower users/visitors to instantly access website menus and easily find what they are looking for on your site. Sticky navigation should stay locked in place as users scroll down a page in a perfect scenerio, as long is it is viewed as functional rather than a hindrance. There's nothing more frustrating >> especially in the case of long-scrolling pages, than to have to scroll all the way up again to navigate to another page on the website design.
Never forget that everything on the Website is speed tested, whether it's in a person's subconsious or a web ranking (loading pages, relevent content, etc.), so allowing visitors easy access to website navigation menus more quickly is a best design practice.
Some times including a sticky navigation bar helps to reduce cognitive load on your users by offering navigation choices there at all times.
Canada Website Designers can show you how we incorporate sticky navigation into your pages. We work with clients to have the most important sections easily accessible and identifiable, by effective color contrast, regardless of page scrolling.
Hypertexting
Hypertext is any text reference on your website pages that visitors click on to get additional info, or navigate towards. Hyperlinks would be considered the most identifiable example of webpage hypertext.
As hypertext contains information that's going to help your visitors find expanding information, it stands to reason that such helpful links are made very noticeable. Proper hypertext identification adds to website navigability of any site built.
The two most basic and most important website hypertext design features would be:
Underlining
Changing the color
>> A mouseover effect is also a design standard that does prove it's worth as an expansion on identifiable information.
Typically underlining any word on your website draws proper attention of website visitors, which helps them navigate to important information with ease.
Similarly, when making the color of hyperlinks different than the text and background of other content, you again, make it stand out on the web page, allowing users an easily identifiable source to click on.
Mega Website Menus
Mega website menus are great for website navigation, especially if the site being designed has a significant amoumt of content and/or categories. eCommerce stores come to mind here and we have done some with millions of unique pages, which makes this type of navigation essential. Website drop-down panels can help open up additional layers of navigation to help your visitors find specifically what they want faster.
Canada Website Designers try to improve the user experience by including benefits like:
Elimination of scrolling,
Tooltips,
and orderly structuring of content by icons, layout or typography.
These features do make it a lot easier to use website navigation menus when they do indeed have to be quite large.
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We create dynamic, realistic, and eye-popping representations of apparels to highlight lifestyle, fit and texture for online sales. Our expertise has successfully completed numerous complex assignments for some of the World's largest online retailers.