·:[ GreenEye Wire ]:·
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If people can’t figure out how to navigate your web site is less than 10 seconds they will hit the back button and go elsewhere. So, these are a few things to keep in mind when designing - or redesigning - a web site.

1. People turn off their brains when they surf the web. Never assume people will ‘get it’ because you believe your audience is ‘tech savy’ or have used the Internet for a long time, or are intimately familiar with your industry. No matter how ‘tech savy’ your audience is, they turn off their brains just like the rest of us.

2. Navigation should be obvious to the point, that, with a glance people are told what to do. People use the web to find things quickly. It should be easily seen and clear. Avoid muted colors for navigational elements, and use crisp clear — preferably non serifed — fonts.

3. Your navigation should have consistent placement on all pages. Decide on a primary, secondary and tertiary navigation placement on the page when you are making your templates: don’t just ‘wing it’ as you go.

4. It should use phrases that are obvious, not obsure. Phrases for navigation should obviously describe where that link goes. Don’t say ‘placement opportunities when ‘jobs’ will do.

5. Button navigation should look like buttons and have a 3-D ‘pushable’ appearance. Flat buttons often get overlooked even if their placement seems obvious to a navigational standard. Sixty percent of the people who were tested on this site did not know that the upper blue ribbon of text was clickable navigation.

6. Navigation should require no interaction from the user to understand it is navigation. Think of it like a highway sign. You don’t have to honk your car horn to make a highway sign readable, and you shouldn’t have to roll over something to find out it is a link.

7. Navigation should not be hidden in drop downs. Drop downs can be used as a secondary element to other navigational standards, but it must not *replace* the main navigation on the page.

8. Text links should look obviously different from the rest of the ‘read-only’ text. In other words, if all your non-link text is black, do not make your linkable text black as well. (Even if the link text is black with an underline…people will miss it.)

9. Avoid the color gray unless it is to denote an ‘inactive’ element. People have gotten familiar with Microsoft’s design standard of making inactive elements in their software programs ‘grayed out’. Many people, while they won’t even realize it they are doing it, will avoid navigational elements that are gray because they have learned that ‘gray’ means ‘doesn’t work’.

10. Navigation should easily tell people where they are in the site. People hate being lost. So always have an easy way for people to tell where they are on the site. Amazon uses a tab system so you always know what section you are in when you peruse their site.

Bonus tip: Always use a site map and have a site search. If people do get lost and are patient enough to try to figure out where they need to go, these two elements will help them find what they need.