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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.
The benefits
of Good Navigation
Some of the benefits of having a well executed
navigation scheme:
- Fewer clicks
in the click path
- Visually easier
to see what your site contains
- 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:
- How will users
use the site?
- How will they
get from one place to another?
- How do you
prevent them from getting lost?
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.
- Browser
back button. When used with hierarchical
hyper linking, the browser back button moves up the
hierarchy. Hand-constructed web sites are often limited
to basic navigation.
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.
Navigation
Middle ware/
Server Side Programming
Beyond basic navigation,
there are many useful additional forms of navigation
that may be added to web sites under software control.
Three types of software system may be used. Middle ware
systems may provide prepackaged navigation facilities
as part of a general site construction toolset. Dynamic
server-side scripts may generate navigation facilities
as add-ons to static and/or dynamic content (e.g. PHP
programming). Static content-generators may be used
to build navigation facilities into generated web pages
(e.g., LaTeX2html).
Top-Level
Navigation Pages
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.
- Site
maps. A site map is a complete hierarchical
presentation of all web pages on a site. It is useful
for systematic exploration and also to definitively
identify information that cannot be found at a site.
- Search
pages. A search page provides access to some
form of search engine to find pages based on query
terms. Note that query terms do not use database query
technology, typically.
- 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. HTML
Frames can be used for navigation bars, but are difficult
to do well. 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.
Designing
Systematic Navigation
There is no predefined right way to architect the navigation
facilities of a web site. The most important principle
is to use systematic facilities that provide consistency
throughout the web site and maintainability over time.
Local navigation can take a number of forms. It can
be a list of topics, such as those found at Yahoo and
GeoCities. It can take the form of a menu of choices
such as the GeoCities members area. Or, it might be
a list of a few related items, such as this lesson's
page titles that you see farther down this page. It
is essential the global navigation system and the local
navigation systems are documented. This can be as simple
as compiling a list of elements that make up each system.
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.
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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