Navigation gives you a window onto the website designer’s creative ability to produce a functional yet visually impressive element that’s fundamental to most websites. The navigation menu is perhaps a website’s single most important component. Read more… Showcase Of Modern Navigation Design Trends In this post, we highlight some remarkable vertical navigation menus, for your inspiration. Vertical navigation menus stack items on top of each other. Horizontal navigation menus display items side by side. Website navigation menus generally come in one of two orientations: vertical and horizontal. Perhaps this is why designers, information architects, usability researchers and user experience specialists invest so much time and resources into devising aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly navigation systems. Navigation menus enable visitors to move from page to page without them, we would have no way to conveniently explore websites. Go to any website and you’re guaranteed to find one thing: a navigation menu. Read more… Showcase Of Beautiful Vertical Navigation Designs If page is long and provides different levels of navigation, will users be able to find their way through the site and use proper navigation quickly? Forcing visitors to use certain keystrokes to navigate, rather than what they’re used to, might be novel, but is that effective if you have to explain instructions prominently on your home page? Here are some examples for your reading pleasure. Three points to consider in any navigation scheme are consistency, user expectations and contextual clues. But there’s a fine line between unexpected and unusable. Read more… Showcase of Interesting Navigation DesignsĮveryone is always looking for interesting and effective ways to organize their website and allow users to move about and find things. But that’s not to say that a creative navigation should be avoided at all costs. Users want to use the website, not be baffled by the weird and hardly usable navigation. A simple, calm navigation is usually much more user-friendly than an evolved, dynamic one. We need to be very careful and cautious when using these dynamic effects in our designs. The wide adaption of JavaScript libraries like jQuery is making it increasingly easy to add various kinds of sleek animations to navigation design.įor instance, many recent promo websites are essentially single page websites with an array of animation effects used to make navigation a smoother and richer user experience. In practice, however, it’s often a tough challenge to come up with a meaningful, unambiguous way to organize, arrange, and display content to users and it’s often not much easier to find a visually interesting solution either. Good navigation is the main cornerstone of an effective website. Read more… Showcase of Creative Navigation Menus: Good and Bad Examples
It’s all about using good information architecture: “the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems.”
Because navigation can vary so much between websites, there are no set guidelines or how-to’s for organizing navigation.ĭesigning navigation is an art in itself, and designers become better at it with experience. Navigation can be simple or complex: a few main pages or a multi-level architecture one set of content for logged-in users and another for logged-out users and so on. The thing that makes navigation difficult to work with in Web design is that it can be so versatile. Read more… Planning And Implementing Website Navigation This is the most important aid you can possibly give to your users as they are constantly seeking a reason to walk out on you. This article is about the tiniest of details that goes into creating the main centerpiece of your digital product-the construction of the elements of your navigation.
Even before you started to read this article, chances are you did because you either had the implicit goal of checking what’s new on Smashing Magazine, or had the explicit goal of finding information about “Navigation Design”. When users look for information, they have a goal and are on a mission. This overview features a hand-picked and organized selection of the most useful and popular Smashing Magazine’s articles related to Web Design navigation and published here over all the years. Menus need to be simple enough for the user to understand, but also contain the elements necessary to guide the user through the website - with some creativity and good design thrown in. Without usable navigation, content becomes all but useless. It determines where users are led and how they interact with the website. Usability is an essential goal of any website, and usable navigation is something every website needs.
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