Select Navigation Tools for Your Site
Your choice of navigational tools will depend on the
size and complexity of your site, your organizational structure, and your
knowledge of your readers’ familiarity with the Web. At a minimum, you should
provide links to and from related pages. However, there are advantages to
providing additional support, including:
Persistent menus – buttons or links that appear
in the same place on all of your pages – make it easier for your readers to
find your way around your site because they will quickly learn where to find it
on each page.
Navigation headers – a line of links running
along the top of a page that mirrors the path the reader took to reach the
page.
Navigation footers – a set of links running
along the bottom of the page.
Figure 1: Examples of a navigation header and persistent menu
Tables of contents – similar to those found in print documents – can help even readers who are relatively unfamiliar with the Web.
Figure 2: A table of contents on a Web site that provides an HTML tutorial
Site maps – graphical representations of your site – are useful because many people have used road maps at some point in their lives.
Drop-down menus – which can be created using HTML forms – have the dual advantage of functioning much like the menus on word processing and other software programs, while taking up relatively little space on your page.
Figure 3: A drop down navigation menu.
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