Website navigation

Easy navigation is essential in a website.
Your visitors want to find your information very quickly, or they will give up and find another website. They are usually disappointed if it takes more than two clicks from the home page to find information on your website.

Here's some quick advice:

1. Navigation menus should not be hard to see on your web page. They should stand out from the body text.
    
2. Menus can be along the top or down the side. Or they can be both. They should be consistant on every page.
    
3. Images, Javascript, Flash or plain text are all OK. Avoid images of words in medieval English script — they make slow reading.
    
4. Plain text organised and styled by css looks as good and loads quicker. The navigation on this page is text and css and is seen by search engines.
    
5. Text (but not graphics or javascript) is read by search engines and text with navigation hyperlinks is treated as important by search engines, so put key search words into the navigation menu.
    
6. For a large number of website pages, break the navigation into groups and sub-groups, keeping the "two clicks" rule in mind.
    
7. Large websites - websites with many pages - justify a search box.