If you’ve ever taken a long road trip, you’ve noticed that highway signs remain consistent across the country. Signs are the same color choices, typically the same typeface, same large readable text, with similar abbreviations. This helps you as a driver to quickly recognize and assimilate where you are and make split second decisions on where you are going.

Consistent navigation helps guide your visitors, avoiding frustration and abandonment.

As people use the internet, they are “travelling” at lightning speed, scanning images and information very
quickly. So your website must have clear and consistent navigation in order to facilitate seamless web experiences.

Experts on web usability say that a good, consistent navigation system should answer these three questions:

1. Where am I?
2. Where have I been?
3. Where can I go?

Just as highway signs let you know: (1) you are on Route 95, (2) you are passing Philadelphia, and (3) you are headed South and can go to Delaware or Baltimore, web navigation gives you visual cues to keep you informed, guided, and not lost. Quickly. Go to another country, and a road trip should not seem all that foreign to you. Similarly, jumping from website to website, you should know what page you’re on, in what section, and what other sections you can navigate to from any page to get to your destination.

Links should stand out and be consistent and legible. Your web designer should use server side includes to form navigation so that it’s consistent on every page. That also makes it easy to make site-wide changes in minutes.  And make sure your navigation is readable and searchable by search engines.

Tags: consistent navigation, Website design

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Graphic design, Guidelines & Best Practices, Navigation, Web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.