One of the most important aspect of your website will be the navigation menu, not only do you want the menu to look well but it must be functional and instinctive to use. If your visitors cannot navigate through your site easily and instinctively traffic and return visits will suffer, it can be a fine balance among usability and good navigation menu design. Let’s discuss some of the features of the navigation menus.
Menus should be accessible:
Navigation menus are place an important role in any webpage. So it should be user friendly and as well as accessible as you can make it. So try to avoid special affects like Flash, Java, or JavaScript as your only navigation method.
Navigation Menus should be Significant:
The navigation menus should be significant. So try to make the links clear and do not try to get cute or use terms that are internal to your organization. Someone who has never been to your site before, should know immediately where the link will takes them while seeing the navigation menu.
The Navigation menus should be understandable:
If you want to use images for your navigation, make sure that there is some text associated with them. “Mystery Meat Navigation” is the purpose of non-descriptive images as navigation, and it’s much more common than you might think.
Prevalent:
Your navigation should appear on every page of your site. While you do not want to have identical navigation, the basic structure should be the same throughout the site, with changes used only to show location within the hierarchy.
Once you have designed your navigation, then you can begin to use it. Sometimes it’s really tempting to change your navigation structure whiles you are in the middle of the navigation menu implementation. But once you have decided to do this, be sure that you are making the change globally and that it fits with the original goals of your taxonomy and information architecture. So it’s better to implement the original design and wait at a week or two. And still if want to make any changes, then go for it. You must confirm that you’re planning and preparation were ultimately correct and not change it at all.