Company Information
architecture is the science of figuring out what you want your
business Web site to function. It's more important than you
might think, and is the foundation of an easy to use,
effective site.
Some of the benefits of having a well executed navigation
scheme:
u Fewer clicks in the click path
u Visually easier to see what your site contains
u Well organized content is more often read
Aspects of Navigation Design; Creating A Suitable
Navigation Architecture - One of the first steps
all-important art of collecting clients' or co-workers'
opinions and assembling them in a coherent, weighted order of
importance. This is partly accomplished by asking the right
questions about the site before engineering begins:
u How will users use the site?
u How will they get from one place to another?
u How do you prevent them from getting lost?
The next step is figuring out who your audiences are going to
be. Once that's out of the way, we can start organizing your
future site into pages of content and functions that the site
will need to have.
Defining the Structure - Take a look at the
site structure listing. What are the major sections? These are
excellent candidates for the global navigation system, which
appears on every page of the site and enables users to quickly
jump between sections. If at all possible, we try to limit the
number of global navigation elements to between five and
seven. Another good idea is to incorporate the branding of
your site - the company logo - into the global navigation as
part of the link back to the site's homepage.
Basic Navigation - Two elements form the
lowest common denominator of web navigation.
Hierarchical hyper linking. Web sites are organized into a
hierarchical structure of sub sites, sub sites and so on. Each
site links to its sub sites. |
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Principle: all other
navigation methods must respect the use of these basic
navigation methods. Basic navigation is ubiquitous and
familiar. Users rely on these basic facilities and become
confused by facilities that interact strangely with the basic
mechanisms.
Four common types of navigation pages are often used for
top-level navigation.
Home pages - Home pages tend to provide both
a site overview and a comprehensive structure for hierarchical
navigation through a site.
Index pages - An index page contains terms according to some
vocabulary, together with links to relevant pages or page
fragments associated with each term.
Navigation Bars - It is common and useful for
sites to provide either horizontal or vertical navigation
bars, either on the main pages of the site or throughout the
site. Dynamic or statically generated navigation
facilities are generally more flexible.
Next/Previous Navigation - A common form of
navigation for on-line documentation or slide presentation is
to use next/previous buttons to link individual sections of a
document or slides of a presentation. Given documents
following a tree-structured hierarchy, next/previous
navigation buttons add leaf-to-leaf links to traverse a
document structure sequentially.
External Navigation - Links to external
resources should be handled in a systematic way. Systematic
distinction between internal and external linking may be
beneficial. Maintenance of external links is an important but
difficult issue.
Site Map Diagrams - Once the purpose and
audience of the site has been focused, our designers can come
up with layout grids, design sketches, and mock-ups, and get
ready to build! Information architecture (also known as IA) is
the foundation for great Web design. It is the blueprint of
the site upon which all other aspects are built - form,
function, metaphor, navigation and interface, interaction, and
visual design.
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