usability.
The purpose of your website is to generate sales. It is imperative that your customers are able to easily navigate your website and make the purchases for which your website was designed.
Navigation
The top portion of your website is prime real estate and should provide a visually appealing navigation system, with eye-catching graphics, as well as a coordinating header and logo.
Your navigation buttons should have excellent positioning within this framework and should appear consistently on every consecutive page of the website, within the header portion of the page. Interior pages must include a link back to the homepage, which makes it simple to go to every page of your website, regardless of what page the consumer is actually on at the time. Links should not be unpredictable, as this confuses your users. In addition, a quality navigation system should answer three basic questions:
- Where am I?
- Where have I been?
- Where can I go from here?
A highlighted navigation feature to help your visitors track their location within your website, called Breadcrumbs, typically appears horizontally across the top of the webpage. These provide links back to each previous webpage that the user has navigated through in getting to their current position. Following the Breadcrumb trail allows the user to navigate back to their point of entry, and may appear as:
