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From Shadowfax

A good website is built on a number of key pillars.

1. Good content
2. Good navigation
3. Good design

Content is essential to attract people to your site. Design and navigation are important to keep them there. But what makes a good design for a website? For a small website a single menu might be able to contain all the pages - but as the site grows that is no longer possible. So what constitutes good navigation?

I think that there are a number of key principles to good navigation.

Contents 1 Customer Focus 2 Consistency & Simplicity 3 Cross Linkage 4 Designing for people as well as robots 5 Static URLs 6 Correct use of Redirects 7 Conclusion

Customer Focus

Many websites make the mistake of grouping their pages by the internal structure of the company, by their perceptions of product delineations (for example dividing a site up into training, consultancy, productivity software etc) or by an esoteric taxonomy dreamt up by business analysts. But casual visitor doesn't know that. If they are interested in Web Design, then they may be interested in all three of my examples, but only as they relate to web design and not as they relate to software engineering. When designing a site it is important to think thematically.

Good website design begins not with an understanding of technology, but with an understanding of the audience.

Consistency & Simplicity

Most sites these days have multiple levels of navigation. Many place these navigation controls in different parts of the screen. Some even duplicate navigation controls in several places. Too much choice is bad. In a supermarket if there are too many choices a customer will dither in the aisles. On the web they're more likely to hit the back button and try the next site on the list.

In principle the main site navigation should be in one obvious place. Once that is established it should not move about. Even if it doesn't display everything at once (as it often cannot), the local contextual menus should always appear in the same location

Cross Linkage

Having stressed the importance of consistency - it is impossible to get it right all of the time for every visitor. So appropriate cross-linking to other relevant articles either within the body of the article or in themed teaser panels becomes important, provided these do not overly clutter the site or confuse the basic navigation principles.

Designing for people as well as robots

Good navigation is important for crawlers to find your content. A significant percentage - most likely the majority - of your traffic is going to come in from search engines - so it is important that your site is easily crawl-able. This means avoiding embedding navigation in elements that are not crawl-able (for example flash or javascript).

However, just designing for robots may mean traffic which is not appropriately directed. Traffic which bounces rather than staying on. Google is good, but it is far from perfect. Your site navigation needs to maximise the possibility that if a client lands on a page which doesn't quite fit, you can direct them to one that does. Thematic cross-linking as addressed above helps here.

Static URLs

Once a page has been created, the URL should always be accessible - unless that page no longer holds relevance. I maintain a list of second hand camera dealers and it never ceases to amaze me how often they change the URLs of their pages. It's not that they've stopped dealing in Canon cameras. It's just that they've changed their site design slightly and the page gets a new name. But as soon as the URL changes, they've lost any page rank associated with that page and all of the external back links.

The navigation tree can change as many times as you like, but the leaf pages should always be accessible by the same URL. I can't really stress this enough! Breaking an incoming link is bad news for you because it loses you traffic, page rank and ultimately business. It is bad news for the site linking to you as it stops people trusting it. It is bad news for the person browsing because it wastes their time.

If you absolutely have to change the URL then make sure that you redirect it properly!

Correct use of Redirects

If a new URL is needed, then a redirect should be used and the redirect should return the right status. Returning 200 for a redirect is bad practice, because it tells a robot that the URL still exists, so the robot will continue to index it at that location. Worse yet if it finds the new location and that also (correctly) returns 200 it is possible that the new page will be ranked lower because it is seen as duplicate content. Ensuring that redirects return 301 status codes is good practice because it helps to cull out obsolete URLs from the search engines whilst maintain ranking.

Redirecting pages takes a bit of work, but it really is worth doing and worth doing well.

Conclusion

Good navigation differentiates the really great sites from the pack. Navigability is the web-master's responsibility. In these days of increasingly complex Content Management Systems it is essential that site navigation is designed for humans by humans and not just left up to the software (and chance!).