Website Navigation

This week we felt our website needed some minor changes to make it a bit more fluid. One are we felt needed the most consideration was the navigation. A recent article in Web Designer magazine illustrated really well how we all have predefined layouts of our houses as one example (like you would know if you went to my house where the best to look for my socks would be). But the same can't be said for websites. The article also highlighted a survey recently that found that a bar across the top of the page that remains constant throughout the site lead the least number of errors. So that's one part solved - where to put the main navigation.

But we also felt that we need to make navigation inside the different subsections clearer too. A good example of the sort of thing we liked was the idea of thumbnails of each project inside the subsection. I can't make my mind up though on whether a patterned border to the page (allowing for widescreen monitors etc...) are a good idea. I think it would have to be an inoffensive yet stylish design to pull it off well.[1]

But that is off the point slightly. The key it seems is making sure the user knows where they are on your site but can also get back to the home page easily and also reach other pages easily without having to go to the homepage first.

1. Headscape & BoagWorld - use background images very effectively

[edit - ak]