Navigation Menu [UPD]

The importance of navigation can't be understated. And, it's understandable why visitors prefer sites that implement website navigation best practices. It can help them quickly and easily find the information they're looking for, so navigation is a quintessential part of the user experience and your website strategy.

Today, we're taking a closer look at website navigation design so you can create a system that suits your visitors. We'll also explore website navigation best practices. After, we'll check out website navigation examples and explore some must-haves for effective design. Let's get started.

Navigation Menu

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Website navigation is a collection of user interface components that allows visitors find content and features on a site. These components can be in the form of copy, link text and buttons, and menus.

A website navigation menu is an organized list of links to other web pages, usually internal site pages. Navigation menus appear in page headers or sidebars across a website, allowing visitors to access the most useful pages quickly.

Navigation is seen as the tip of the iceberg of a website's information architecture (IA), according to IA analyst Nathaniel Davis in an article for UXmatters. Below the water's surface are the portions of this iceberg the front-end visitor can't see: The research, strategy, management, and organization that went into building the website's IA. Above the surface is the navigation interface, most often represented as a series of hypertext links and a search bar.

So, your website's IA isn't visible in the navigation interface but is the foundation of that interface. This ultimately provides visitors the sense that the content is connected and categorized to meet their needs and expectations but never actually shows all the spreadsheets and diagrams that went into identifying and organizing those relationships among your content.

Here's a look at an example of a website's hierarchy. A little intimidating at first glance, but it's digestible when you get a feel for what each term means. You'd likely only see the three section names in a primary navigation menu from that first level. Then, the subpages will likely be nested in a sub-navigation menu.

Take the nonprofit website for the Nashville Zoo, for instance. The primary navigation menu contains the navigation item "Support." When you hover over that item, a sub-navigation menu appears, offering multiple ways to support the zoo. This is an effective add because visitors can seamlessly find what they're looking for, but the menu is not overwhelming at first glance. It's a win-win.

Why exactly is website navigation so cruical? Well, for starters, it impacts whether visitors arrive on your homepage and browse or click the "Back" button, leading to a higher bounce rate. As a result, you should deeply consider the best way to structure your website navigation. And that's where the different types of it come into the picture.

How you structure your website navigation depends on your target audience and what format you think would be most intuitive and accessible. Here are some common types of website navigation you may consider as you build your site.

Let's kick it off with the horizontal navigational bar. As you might have guessed, the horizontal navigation bar is the most common type. It lists the major pages side-by-side and places them in the website header. Many websites feature the same sections, like "About," "Products," "Pricing," and "Contact," because visitors expect to see them.

While these sections are popular for a reason, you shouldn't be afraid to customize your site by tailoring your menu. When you build your navigation bar, consider your website purpose and audience. What are you trying to achieve on your site, and what are visitors looking for? Start by answering those two questions and go from there.

Up next, we have the dropdown navigation menu. This option is ideal for content-rich sites with a complex IA. If you want your menu to include plenty of links to pages, you may consider using this option, as you can't list all the options side-by-side. Instead, you can list the most crucial or general items in the top-level navigation bar. Then, you can add the rest in a dropdown menu.

Take Sephora, for instance. This site offers an excellent example since it offers so many products and services. You can hover over any primary navigation link on its website, and a detailed dropdown menu will appear.

Another option you should keep in mind for website navigation is the hamburger. You might already be familiar with this menu because it's popular with mobile web design. If you use this approach, your navigation items will be listed horizontally on larger screen sizes.

On a smaller screen, however, they will collapse behind a hamburger button on smaller screen sizes. And when visitors click on this three-line icon, a vertical drop-down or horizontal pop-out appears with the navigation links. If there's limited real estate on your site or you don't want navigation taking up a large chunk of space, the hamburger navigation menu might be the right pick.

Now, we have vertical sidebar navigation menus. This is an excellent choice for website navigation because it offers a seamless user experience. The items are stacked on top of each other and positioned in the sidebar. Admittedly, this is less popular than horizontal navigation, but vertical navigation has benefits. Real estate isn't as limited so that you can write longer navigation links. There's also the opportunity for more top-level options.

With website navigation design, there's no one "right" way. But there is a right way to think about how you'll set up your navigation: By considering how you can enable first-time and repeat visitors to make the most of your website. You can't go wrong if you create your website navigation with that in mind.

When you center your focus on your site visitors, your navigation structure may look and function differently than a navigation structure on another site. That's actually a good thing because it means you're adequately considering your target audience in mind.

Because there are a lot of pages on your site, determining which are cruical enough to be part of the universal navigation can be tricky. For SEO and user experience, Orbit Media recommends keeping your navigation limited to seven items at most.

But how do you begin to narrow the field? Stakeholders from your company may have varying opinions about what is nav-worthy and what is not, but keep user experience central. Ultimately, consider your website visitors to determine which route you should take. Here are some strategies you can use to get started deciphering what your site visitors want to see on your menu.

Card sorting is a simple user experience technique that helps you get into the minds of your website visitors and design the navigation from their standpoint. And no, you don't need any UX experience to try this exercise.

Take HubSpot's website, for instance. While some of our content offers garner lots of traffic, the most common pages viewed by people buying HubSpot software include product pages, pricing, case studies, and partners. Look at our homepage, and you'll see that the navigation reflects this finding and prioritizes those critical pages.

Order matters in website navigation. Cognitive studies provide evidence that web page viewers tend to remember links on either end of the navigation most vividly. Often referred to as the primacy and recency effects, they speak to the phenomena that words presented either first or last in a list tend to pull more heavily on the attention span of viewers. So for your website, you'll want to be very intentional about what items you place in these spots. Think about what is most important for your typical visitor.

The best way to phrase your navigation options varies depending on the type of organization or business you run. For starters, you can opt for straight-forward navigation or experiment with more creative labels. Of course, make sure whatever you choose feels intuitive to your brand.

When choosing the words to use in your main navigation links, what's most important to remember is to think first about the terms your customers would use to describe those pages. Then, think of search engine optimization.

Arguably the most clear-cut option for websites is object-based navigation. Object-based navigation places content under concrete (typically noun-only) categories. HubSpot.com is an example of object-based navigation, as is Emerson College's site below. This type of organization treats the navigation as a table of contents and groups pages into the topics or categories that best fit.

Action-oriented navigations may be a better fit for other sites. To know when this is appropriate, ask your audience whether they primarily come to your website to learn about something or to take a specific action. In the example below from Howard University, visitors come with an action in mind. They aren't visiting to read the "about" page -- they're coming to apply, visit, or donate.

For companies with multiple audiences with clear lines, you may want to consider audience-based navigation or sub-navigation, as in the example below. This only works, however, if a visitor can easily classify themselves. For example, you wouldn't want to use small vs. medium size company, or marketing vs. advertising agency, since those lines are often blurred and may leave your audience confused as to where to go first.

In addition to matching how your audience instinctually organizes your site, you'll want to think of how to optimize your navigation terms for search best. In an article on Distilled, SEO strategist Kristina Kledzik advises using Google Analytics and Google's Keywords tool to identify the search terms that most commonly bring people to your site. Then, you can use variations on those words as the guide for your website navigation.

By now, you know that there's no "right" way to create website navigation. As long as your site navigation enables your visitors to find the information they're looking for and encourages them to take action, it's successful. Let's check out examples below that do exactly that. 006ab0faaa