Site flexibility and expandability aren’t important to visitors, but they certainly are
to those of us who must maintain the site. When our industry talks about web time,
it’s referring to the fact that web sites must be nimble enough to adjust quickly
and with little warning to changing business needs.
Our navigation system must be
fl exible enough to accommodate such adjustments. For example, a menu consisting
of navigational text is very easy to update (whether adding, altering, or deleting
links). On the other hand, an impressive Flash animation that consists of fi ve links,
slowly rotating in a circle, is not; adding or deleting a single link would mean that
everything else on the graphic would need to be rearranged, and all of the animation
must follow suit. Always consider ease of future maintenance when evaluating
a particular navigation scheme.
Required Navigation
At the very least, every page should include the following navigation aids to facilitate
wayfinding:
- Site identification (logo, name, etc.) and page identifi cation (title line and
page header). You simply can’t depend on the home page to orient your visitors,
because they don’t always come in through that front door. A search engine or another site might have sent the visitor directly to a lower-level page (called deep
linking), or the visitor might have entered via a bookmark to a subsidiary page. You
should display site and page identification on every page in the site, so that visitors
aren’t lost or bewildered, stuck on some unidentified lower-level page.
- Contact information, or an obvious link to the page containing contact information.
Contact information should include not only email contacts but also phone
numbers and postal address. Even though we might prefer to deal with electronic
communication from our visitors, many of the visitors have come to distrust sites
that refuse to reveal a physical presence in addition to a virtual one.
- A link to the home page (unless the page in question is the home page).
Although the site identifi cation/logo can serve as a link to the home page,
there should still be an explicit “Home” link as well. In any case, the user should
always be able to return to the home page in a single click, regardless of where
he or she is on the site.
- Links to the main pages under the home page. These links, along with the
link to the home page, are termed persistent global navigation because they are
on every page in the site. The global navigation serves to do more than just
link to main pages; it also provides the visitor with a conceptual map of the site
structure and scope.
As appropriate, some pages might also include:
- Local navigation for subsections under the current page. This navigation evolves
from the subcategories and labels that were identifi ed for the site architecture.
This is also called cross-over navigation because it links sideways to sibling
pages, rather than up or down the hierarchy.
- A search function, which is obviously more important for larger sites than for
smaller ones.
- Site-wide utilities, such as “Store Locator” or “Checkout.”
Organizing Navigational Structure to Match Site
Structure
In the previous navigation related article, we examined creating the site architecture based upon a
taxonomy and its preferred labels. Once we have determined these categories and
subcategories and assigned labels to them, the underlying structure of the site itself
becomes apparent to us. Now we employ navigation to make that underlying architecture
apparent to our visitors. Navigation, then, is the site architecture made visible.
There are three basic models for organizing the navigation of a site: random-access
navigation, sequential navigation, and hierarchical navigation.
Random-access Navigation
A random-access scheme requires visitors to pick individual, unrelated topics randomly
from a menu. A random access model isn’t truly organization it’s chaos.
Without a visible structure of some sort, visitors have trouble finding what they are
looking for, instead becoming overwhelmed and giving up. Random access “organization,”
or lack thereof, might be acceptable in entertainment or experience sites,
where the challenge of fi guring out the navigation is considered to be part of the
entertainment, but it’s rarely suitable for mainstream web sites. It’s just too diffi cult
to find anything, and visitors can’t build a mental map of the site.
Sequential Navigation
A sequential navigation scheme is designed to be read one page after another. An example
would be a long article spaced over several pages, with a “next” link at the bottom of
all but the final page in the series.
Although we are comfortable with this structure after all, books have been organized
on a “next page” structure for rather a long time now it’s rarely appropriate
for an entire web site. Most of the time, visitors aren’t reading our entire web site
from “cover to cover.” As a result, sequential navigation is usually implemented only
for selected pages within a site.
Hierarchical Navigation
Hierarchical navigation schemes, the most pervasive, require following links up and
down a hierarchy. Humans have a natural affinity for hierarchical organization in
all areas of our existence, whether it’s categorizing genera and species in nature,
depicting our family tree, setting up a corporate management structure, or organizing
a web site. Ideally, hierarchies are structures that we understand intuitively,
making them the perfect framework upon which to hang a navigation system.
Creating a graphical hierarchy chart manually, outside of a development environment,
is usually more trouble than it’s worth, and adding new pages later can be a
rearrangement nightmare. It’s much easier and usually just as effective to use a text
outline, as shown just a bit ago.
The menu system in a hierarchical scheme usually mirrors the hierarchical structure
of the site architecture that we identifi ed earlier. Still, links that disregard the
structure can be valuable as well. For instance, a lower-level content page might
actually fi t under two separate categories in the hierarchy. Computer buyers visiting
Dell’s site might locate a laptop computer by clicking on “laptops,” or they might
navigate to the same page by clicking on “home users.” Fortunately, the hypertext
(that is, linkable) nature of the web allows us to link to and cross-reference pages
from within multiple categories, without redundantly storing multiple physical
copies of those documents. On the web, one thing can indeed seem to be in two
places at once. | 
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