Hidden Treasures - Good or Bad?

Is your site full of hidden treasures? Let's hope not.

Treasures, good. Hidden, bad. If your site's visitors can't navigate effortlessly through all parts of your site, your web presence isn't as effective as it could be.

A well-designed navigation system is a critical component of any successful web site. It should be persistent and consistent throughout the site and should answer these four questions:

1. Where am I?
2. Where have I come from?
3. How do I get back?
4. Where can I go?

An effective navigation system not only answers these four questions, it answers them quickly. The navigation must provide clear visual clues that let visitors reach their destinations with minimal effort.

For starters, consider the placement of your main menu. This should consist of 5-7 high-level choices that represent the main areas of your site. If your visitors can always pick one of these choices, no matter which product or bit of knowledge they're after, you're golden. Your main menu really sets the tone.

Since the natural tendency of the eye is to move from top to bottm left to right, your main menu should be placed in the vicinity of the top left of the page -- and not just the home page, but on EVERY page.

Now to the four questions:

First, where am I?

Each page should be labeled clearly as to the content of the page. A larger font size, emphasized text or different color should differentiate page's title from the text of the body. The visitor shouldn't have to guess as to the focus of the page.

Second, where have I come from?

What main area of the site am I in? It needs to be clear to the visitor which selections she made to get to the current page.

This leads to the third question: How do I get back?

At the very least, your visitor should be able to one-click back to the home page or to another main area of your site.

One classic way of answering questions 1-3 is with "bread crumbs", or recursive navigation. Like the crumbs dropped in the woods by Hansel and Gretel to mark the way back home, a site's bread crumbs mark the path a visitor takes through the hierarchy. Yahoo! and CNET are classic examples of sites that use bread crumbs. Their bread crumbs not only tell me where I am (question 1) and where I've come from (question 2), they let me return with one click to any of the previous levels (question 3).

Finally, where do I go from here? This is usually the toughest of the questions to answer, and possibly the most critical to user acceptance of your site. Proper site planning and organization are key. In general, you don't want your site to be too wide (too many choices on any given page) or too deep (too many clicks required to reach the destination).

Take some time to site down and review your site, making sure that you can answer all four questions for each page. For best results, make this a regular event in your web maintenance schedule to keep your treasures unhidden.