Navigation Rules & Options Tutorial    Back

How the user navigates around your web site can make or break your site. If the site is too difficult to navigate around the user is not going to enjoy the time spent on your site and may leave or not return again.

With this in mind you need to make your navigation controls as obvious and simple as possible.

Keep the navigation controls consecutive. It's no good changing the colour or the place of your navigation controls, as this will only confuse the user. Using frames for your site may help with this.

There are different ways you can create navigational controls for your web site and they are: -

- Text
- Images

Text
This is the simplest way to link pages on your site. Although not as attractive as graphical navigational controls you are at least guaranteed fast downloading times and can be viewed in all web browsers.

Images
Using images to make navigation buttons to link the various pages on your site together can really make a site, but not everyone, such as the visually impaired and browsers that don't display images, will be able to view the buttons. To overcome this problem you can use the HTML ALT tag, which will display a text alternative to your button images.

With images you can use icons or symbols to represent where the link will lead. Again here you must be careful, as what means a mailbox in your country may have no meaning to people from other countries.

It maybe good to use text links with your icons or symbols, that way you get the best of both worlds.