A good website navigation design has good information design, graphic design and interaction. Apart from these there are several other factors that determine if the website navigation design is good. Here are the characteristics of a good website navigation design.
Information design
A good navigation design should have links, images and text.
It is difficult to read from a computer screen if the resolution is low. A good design has legible texts. It also has fonts that matches the type of the site. The letter cases are generic. It does not use capital letters as people might overlook.
Usually, the designers are tempted to choose small fonts as it accommodates more menu lists. But if the text is too small it is difficult to read from the site. A good design uses font between ten point and 12 points. Also, the main navigation font should be larger than the local navigation.
The best navigation websites use the options of bolding and italicizing at right places.
Interaction Design
The website with good interaction navigation design consists of the following
- Underlined links
- Rollover effects
- Size of clickable navigation options
By default, the links are underlined in blue color.
The rollover effects are the appearance of navigation option when the mouse is moved over the link. A good web navigation design includes such options. Also, the tabs and navigation bars carry rollover effect.
Graphic design
The standard question here is if a navigation design be done using images. The answer is NO. A good website navigation design uses text over graphics. This is because of following reasons
- The text-based links loads faster than graphics
- It gives better clarity. For instance, the links already visited by user can be shown in a different color
- It is easy for the screen readers to read from texts
A good navigation chooses its colors efficiently. For instance, the main navigation tabs are in one color and utility navigation tabs are in a different color and so on. A good design focuses on background color, image positioning, size and alignment.
Icons
The use of icons increases the scent of information in a website. They help to increase the user ability in finding answers to their questions. Also, they increase the clickable area of navigation. There are no standard icons available. The website creator has to create his own icons.
A good design has minimum number of icons.Do not use too many icons. Use a maximum of six to ten icons for the entire site.The website should use a common language of icons. It should be easy to understand for the user.
Other Characteristics
- The responsiveness of the website is undisturbed even if the number of visitors increases.
- The navigation menu should stay consistently at the same place during subsequent changes in the website menu.
- A good website navigation design helps in increasing SEO ranks.
- It should be simple. Simpler designs are the most effective designs.
- The negative spaces in the website are used strategically in a good design. Negative space are the empty white spaces between the content or images in a web page. It is essential to leave enough negative space in the web pages. This makes the content readable.
Focus of design to make the look perfect! If you’re looking for website optimisation, development and navigation design, we think you’ll find what you’re looking for at Shepparton website designers.
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