Website Navigation
The main purpose of website navigation must be to guide the visitor in a logical and prioritized fashion. It should help the visitor find relative information in an easier and understandable manner. Here is what you can start off with:
Take a top down approach. Divide and categorize all your topics and links. For example, I have five major topics. 1) Home 2) Develop Website 3) Promote Website 4) Monetize Website and 5) Money & Investing.
They are all distinct entities. The second and third categories are more related with each other than the rest. So, when I am talking about promoting website, sometimes I link back to developing because badly designed website is hard to promote. The visitors would not stay long on your site. Imagine if all of those links were lumped into one long list. How much harder would it be to figure out where to go?
If you have more than 5 or 6 links, categorizing becomes very important. Try to find some natural groups. For example, suppose you sell widgets, and your site has this set of links: Mini Widgets Multi-colored Widgets Discounted Widgets About Us Contact Us Company News.
Your major categories then are: Products Company Info. When you separate the two sets of links according to those major categories, it becomes much easier to sort the available information. The simple reason is that a choice between two items is less complex than a choice between 6 items. It's the principle of dividing and conquering.
After you have categorized all the links, now is the time to prioritize them. That means what category comes after the other. In our case, Home is the index page. Here you will find some free information to read and some info about the company on a vertical menu.
On the horizontal menu, the items are prioritized in a logical and progressive way. You develop a website and in order to share it with the world, next comes promote and then monetize website. Hopefully, when you start making money, then the last chapter talks about money & investing.
To prioritize is as important as to categorize. Hopefully, you have some idea of what you want visitors to do on your site. Your site should be designed to drive a specific action. In other words, get visitors to do a specific thing. Once you have decided what your primary goal is, your navigation should reflect it.
The links that pertain most closely to your main goals should be emphasized the most. You need to guide the visitors in the direction you want them to go. Prioritize. Ask yourself the question, "What is most important?" What do you really want to accomplish?
Note about downloading pages - The way I download my website internal pages is: I have divided a page in four distinct parts for downloading in the order given below:
1. The top horizontal part where I have stated some introduction to the website. This is the first #include in the content file being downloaded.
2. The left vertical menu and the horizontal menu - a little below 1. This is the second #include in the content file being downloaded.
3. The content file itself
4. The vertical adverts on the right hand side. This is the third #include in the content file being downloaded.
Initially, I had one big #include file in the content file. The problem was that the page was a lot slower because the adverts - external links - were being downloaded before the vertical menu and horizontal menu.
In a Nutshell
Categorize all your links. Once you do that, prioritize them but do it in a more progressive way. One topic or chapter leads to another in a systematic fashion.
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Back to where came from - At the end of every page, you would see a button for Back To Previously Visited Page. No matter what page you are at, when you click on this button, it will bring you back to the previous page. So, let us say you are at a page on Develop Website menu and because you clicked on a link and now you are on Promote Website menu, you click on this button and you will come back on Develop Website menu to the page that you previously came from.
Even when you click on WordPress blog basics plus, and want to come back to the same page that you left from, just click on a Back to where you came from, It will bring you back to mywebsiteworkout.com.
The following is the code for Back To Previously Visited Page:
<form action="">
<input type="button" value="Back To Previously Visited Page"
onClick="javascript: history.go(-1)">
</form>
Open page - When you click on a link - whether link to internal page or external website page, usually there are three choices with us, especially with using newer versions of a browser:
Open page in New Window - Pressing SHIFT key while clicking on a link.
Open page in New Tab - Pressing CTRL key while clicking on a link.
Open page in Same Window - Do nothing, just click on a link.
Note: As I have stated in website design item of the vertical menu, the webmaster has a choice of which option to follow by default. I chose same window for internal pages and open in new window for external pages. With the description of the three choices given here, I think I would make changes in all the content files so that external pages will open in the same window and let the user make the decision about that. That is my next project.
