Picture this: you've finished your first webdesign masterpiece, you're proudly showing it off to everyone you know, and someone has the audacity to tell you that he can't figure out your navigation. This leaves you with two choices: listen to reasonable criticism and try to learn from it, or be smug and superior towards the poor soul who couldn't find his way through your tangled navigational web.

A few months/years later, you've taken the plunge and are now designing some websites in your spare time for a little pocket change. Even though you may have been a power surfer since the age of six, you need to realise that there are still some people out there with very little internet experience. If a newbie can't find his way through the bestseller list at Amazon.com, then that's Amazon.com's problem. However, if a newbie can't find his way through your client's website, guess what? You've got trouble my friend, right here in CyberCity.

What may have appeared to you a completely obvious and simple scheme of navigation, may be totally befuddling and confusing to the newbie looking to spend a few dollars on your client's product. Remember, your job as webdesigner is to make sure that your client's website is accessible to the largest percentage of the internet population possible, especially if you're working for a small company or individual.

I have to click WHAT? to get WHERE?!

If you haven't discovered that an old fashioned pencil and notepad come in really handy when plotting the initial design of a website, then now's the time to play with the idea. It doesn't matter whether you use concentric circles, boxes and lines, or Picasso-like figures, just get something down on a piece of paper so that you can visualise different ways that the website can be structured.

Once you've decided upon structure, you can begin planning what kind of navigational menu is best. (Remember, you can do anything you want for your personal website, but you must think in practical terms when building sites for others.) If you use a simple text menu, is it obvious that it is a menu? (Are the words bolded, CAPPED, large enough for good visibility, appearing in a consistent location?) Have you added a title to your links so the surfer has an idea where "Library" or "Sales" will take him/her? If you use buttons or a template, is there logic to the order of your buttons?

To link or not to link . . . that is the question

Some Top 10 lists for building webpages insist that you must do things the way they've always been done: i.e., all links must be underlined, active links should appear blue, and visited links should appear purple. But, you say, underlined links look tacky with your scanline background, not to mention the fact that your colour scheme is lime green and tangerine, so purple is absolutely out?

Frankly, I take that advice with a grain of salt. If it were such a high priority for links to be underlined all the time, then we wouldn't have handy little CSS scripts to dispense with the lines. Initially, I chose to remove the underlines from ALL my personal homepage links, until I began to be more concerned about clear navigation. Currently, my homepage uses a text menu script, which shows active links in blue without an underline, but on mouseover, displays the links as purple and underlined. (Luckily, my page has a blue scheme so the colour problem doesn't apply.)

Here at JEMS WebDesign links are always purple (in the midst of blue text), and surfers who use Internet Explorer are treated to a nifty pale yellow highlight over each link. This presents another issue to consider: solving a link problem involves serious consideration of cross-browser compatibility. While my links are quite clear in NetScape, those surfers are losing the highlight effect. However, since I also have a clearly marked navigational menu, I feel it's a decent trade-off.

In summation:

1.  Is your menu clear and consistent?
2.  Is it obvious that your links are links?
3.  If you're using rollover tricks, is their use consistent?
4.  Does the navigation retain a similar look in other browsers?
5.  Have you asked other people to critique the site-in-progress?

Remember that the navigation is a snap for you - it should be, you designed the site! Try to see your design with a fresh pair of eyes, and examine all potential pitfalls seriously. It's better to design it right the first time than to have to make adjustments down the road.

Happy coding!

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