Choosing A Navigation Pattern For Your Web Design

How many of you believe that navigation is one of the most important aspects of any web design? All who put their hands up would be 100% correct – without good navigation, a website will, essentially, become completely useless to anyone who visits it, as they won’t be able to find the information that they need. Many people, however, make the mistake of thinking that there is a one-size-fits-all solution that will work for any website. Different types of website actually require different types of navigation.

Blogs

A web design for a blog will, generally, have a reasonably large amount of content that is often posted in reverse-chronological order. You have a number of navigation options:

• Pagination or continuous scrolling
• A page dedicated to archives
• Sidebar navigation (specifically for categories or tags)
• Header and footer navigation

E-commerce Sites

Design for e-commerce websites, on the other hand, is often highly complex and will feature hundreds (if not thousands) of pages for individual products and so on. Your navigation options include:

• Assisted search (allows visitors to refine their results)
• Sidebar navigation (specifically for categories)
• Breadcrumb navigation (when you have sub-categories)

Corporate Sites

When it comes to web design for a corporate website, you will have to take into account the purpose, structure and size when it comes to choosing a suitable navigation option:

• Sidebar navigation (specifically for categories and pages)
• Header navigation
• Sitemap (for users who get stuck)
• Search functionality

Community and Social Networking Sites

Designing a website that is for a community or social networking will require completely different navigation; after all, searching for new things is often the primary focus of these sites:

• Search functionality
• Sidebar navigation (specifically for user’s profiles)
• Header navigation (again, specifically for user’s profiles)

Personal Sites

If you are creating a personal web design, you are afforded the freedom of using basically any sort of navigation that you like. Just make sure that they are consistent and easy to follow:

• Header and footer navigation
• Sidebar navigation
• Sitemap (often a good idea to include)

Regardless of the information that we have provided you with above, you can basically get away with using any sort of navigation pattern for your web design, providing that it is well executed and is consistent across the entire site. If you are working on a corporate website, for example, but have fallen in love with the assisted search function, there is nothing stopping you from incorporating it into your site. Just make sure that the designer implements it in a way that works.