Web Design: Navigation Menus

Generally, in web design, there are three main types of navigation menus. Theres the type that goes across the top of the content, the type that goes down the left side of the page, and the type that goes down the right side of the page. Generally, in good web design, you don’t want to stray from these three common navigation bars.

The reason is ease of use. The majority of time that people spend on the web is on other websites and those websites generally use the standard three types of navigation menus. Any non standard one generally will only be intuitively easy to use for the person who made it. The biggest problem with a cool navigation is that new visitors are easily dissuaded from leaving your site and if they can’t figure out how to navigate, they simply won’t.

The most common types of navigation for sites that don’t use standard navigation panels are: no navigation menus, image menus and flash navigation menus. If they look like standard navigation panels, then it should be fine, but usually if a webmaster creates these type of navigation menus, it will be nonstandard. No navigation menu is highly not recommended unless your site only has one page. Image menus could work if all the links are readable and intuitive (Test how intuitive it is by asking friends). Flash ones generally are whole page animations that end with a navigation page. It could work, but it has no SEO value and using the back button is very annoying as the animation must reload.