Navigation is the single most important tool that visitors need to access information they are looking for in a website. It must be simple, clear, intuitive and easy to use and, therefore, must be done right.

Navigation Quick Tips

1. Decide what your prime content is.
2. Make sure that those links are as close to top left as practicable within your web design.
3. Do check your navigation is consistent across all your pages.
4. Do check your navigation works across multiple browsers.
5. Do make sure you can navigate to any page on your website within 3 clicks.

Website navigation is something of a fuzzy picture. There are no right and wrong ways and there are no hard and fast rules. The best rule to apply is one of the all-time, longest standing rules around: KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) You want your primary pages to be instantly findable by any visitor hitting any page on your website. Maybe your most popular landing page is your home page, but a visitor can turn up at any page on your website, and there's no use them turning up on the 'product-x.html' page, if they have no easy way of getting back to the home page of your site.

Because your home page is usually the first page that visitors are led to in their searches, it should contain a general idea of all the necessary information that they want to know and should contain the links leading to all the other web pages. In this connection, each and every web page in your website should provide a link back to your home page in case visitors get lost while navigating.

If you check your navigation, and your primary page links are somewhere near the top left of your screen, and your visitors can get to any page on your website within 3 clicks, then you're not going to go too far wrong. Some basic user testing always helps in this area - you can ask friends or family to try to contact you via your website, give them the URL, and see how they get on. Or ask them to find your 'xyz page' then get their feedback on how easy they found it to get there, how long it took them, or whether they got frustrated.

I've asked many friends and associates over the years to cast their eye over my website or sites I'm developing. And not all of them are involved in the IT, web or design industry itself - some work in completely unrelated fields. One of them is my mother (one of the best testers, actually). The point is - you don't have to allocate some of your budget for testing if you're running a tight ship. Call in some favours.