Outlining your web site’s structure early in the design process will help facilitate a good navigational structure allowing the visitors to your web site an easy easy to find they are looking for. A consistent complaint coming from website visitors is how difficult it is to find the information they want. By thinking through your navigation and structure upfront you will gain a benefit when trying to update your site in the future.

Understanding your content

Look at the content you have available to use on your website. This may sound obvious but it is surprisingly overlooked. If you have a site currently, start there. Also take a look through your marketing materials, brochures, articles, product descriptions, etc. Once you have an understanding of the information you have available start creating logical buckets, or groupings of the information.

You may find it necessary to create buckets within buckets (sub-directories) in order to organize your content appropriately. For example a photography site may have a bucket that contains examples of all the types of photography the company does. A grouping like this would work but it would quickly become very large and overwhelming. But what if the photography bucket was broken down into smaller groupings such as portrait, black and white, wedding, baby, pets, etc.? By creating smaller groupings the user can quickly and easily narrow down the scope of photography and identify the type that pertains most to what they were looking for.

Once the content has been identified and grouped appropriately you should now be able to label each of the buckets (including any sub-bucket that was created).This will serve as your primary and possible secondary navigation.

Placement of Primary Navigation

Now that the content has been identified, grouped and labeled in a way that logically makes sense to the end user it is important to think about how and where the site navigation will be placed.

By-and-large there are two primary locations for website navigation; across the top or down the left side of the page. Large sites, such as e-commerce sites, use a combination of the two. As the size of your website grows so should your navigation system.

Some sites (this one included) run navigation down the right. This by no means is wrong it just isn’t as common as across the top or down the left. Interesting to note however, is with the proliferation of blogging navigation appearing on the right is becoming more popular.

As with everything there are going to be trade-offs with each type of navigation structure. Listed below are some of the basics of each.

• Tabs Across the Top
  Located near the top of the page visitors are quickly able to view the most important buckets (primary navigation) of your site. The biggest downside of using tabs is limited amount of space available. The size of the labels combined with the size of the tabs themselves will limit the number of tabs that you will be able to fit without causing horizontal scrolling, a usability faux paux.

  Focus on the main buckets as doorways into your site.

• Left Rail
  This navigation runs down the left side of your site. Left navigation allows you to show more options than what top navigation does. Showing the main buckets as well as sub-buckets will help users orient themselves with your site and the breadth of offerings.

  E-commerce sites are good examples of sites that use left navigation well. Since there is typically a lot of different types of products available using the left navigation to better organize them helps users quickly to locate what they are after.

Other navigational systems should be considered when your site begins growing larger than a handful of pages (usually 15 pages or more).

• On-Site Search
  Providing an on-site search is a good way to supplement your primary navigation system. With a few exceptions on-site searches should never be used as a primary navigational system. Again, e-commerce sites tend to do on-site search well.
• Footer Links
  Footer links, as indicated by the name, run in the footer of your site and provide an additional means for users to navigate your site. As with an on-site search footer links should never be used as a primary navigational system.

  An added benefit of providing footer links is from SEO standpoint. Most likely footer links are text based (not always the case with tabs) allowing search engine spiders to easily read and follow these links.

• Site Maps
  Site maps provide the overall website structure. Think of the site map as an outline for the information contained within your site.

  Site maps again provide an SEO benefit by bubbling up links to all the pages of your website.

Conclusion

When designing or re-designing your website it is extremely important to lay the foundation upon which your site can be built. This foundation will help guide you in determining your navigational system and your primary and secondary buckets.

Finally, by having a well organized and well structured site you will ease your users’ frustrations and create a user friendly site that helps them find what they are looking for.