Navigation and its importance
The importance of your navigation structure cannot be over-emphasised. Without some sort of navigation, a site loses all sense of structure and organisation. There are many ways of presenting your navigation: in a bar down one side of the screen, along the top and bottom, or in a frame that stays with you throughout your visit to a site. It is important to allow access to the rest of your site from anywhere. Ideally, you should be able to go to any page in a maximum of two or three clicks, with your main pages accessible in one.

Stuff that every page should have
There are navigational things that just have to be present if your site is going to be easy to get around.

First and foremost, is a link back to your homepage. If you've done it right, your homepage should be a central hub that connects to all the other parts of your site. The homepage link is an escape route. If someone has gone deep into your site, away from what they were looking for, they can return to the homepage and look again; or if they found what they wanted, to find something different.

If you're using a graphic or logo as your homepage link, the established place to put it is in the top-left of your layout.

A search facility is also very helpful. It is a feature of your site that guarantees your readers results, whereas clicking through a load of pages might not find them what they were looking for. Get one just like ours at the excellent » Atomz.com. If you have a lot of pages it might be worth activating the advanced search feature too.

If you have the patience, tweak your search until you are confident the most relevant results are popping up at the top. A search is useless if it doesn't work efficiently. Use META tags and some of the options integrated into your search engine to improve its accuracy. Keep records of what your readers want.

A 'breadcrumb trail'. That is the row of links that can bring you back through the site. I place it at the very top of the page, which is probably where it is most useful, although it could also be used at the bottom as well. This is another way to prevent people feeling lost in your site. If they take a wrong turn, they know they can go back to anywhere they've already been; or if they hit upon a page that they find almost relevant and want something similar they can get into the correct section.

It also gives the intelligent reader some idea of your site structure. It is not necessary to know this, but I find it helpful if I understand a site a bit more. It means the page will make more sense in the context of the site as a whole. This is especially helpful when someone arrives on a page deep in your site from a search engine and has no idea where they are in relation to the rest of a site.

Page jumps are very necessary if a page is very long, but they are equally important in place of the page up and page down buttons. Most people prefer never to touch their keyboard while browsing, and a lot of people don't like using the scroll bar either. In these cases only the very tops of your pages are being read. Therefore, page jumps or a javascript listbox are the answer to all of these problems.

A Full Index or Site Map is essential on even a modestly-sized site. Make sure there is a link to this on all pages, and that it's as prominent as your homepage links. Not only do indexes offer a gateway to every other page of your site, but they also impress your reader with the depth of content available and will encourage them to stick around and see the sights.

Familiarity
Most often, it's the sites that have a new, different interface and navigation structure that users find hardest to find their way around. This is why you should design your site around the way everyone else designs theirs. This is not to say you can't be original; and yes, many sites get by simply because they are original. But the fact is, the most popular sites are the ones that don't ask the user to figure out how they work. No one cares how your site works. They just want to read what you're offering them.

You still have plenty of freedom to personalise your navigation structure through use of colour, icons and text-formatting, but keeping to a basic underlying framework will ensure your site is simple to navigate no matter how you dress it up.

Something that you must realise (and makes perfect sense) is that 'Users spend most of their time on other sites'.* So when they arrive on yours, it would help them if it worked the same as the sites they know and love.

Familiarity is the key word here. If the site has a familiar feel to it, the users can be more sure of what they are doing. They feel safe clicking on links, knowing that something unexpected won't happen.They get the feeling of control.

Ways to make your site seem familiar

1. Do not change the default link colours
   Changing the link colours from blue and purple just confuses people. 'Have I been to that page yet? Hmm... maybe I'll check... Ah crap I have!' I think you see what I'm saying here. You can change the colours, but just make sure to keep the scheme simple - i.e. all visited links are a darker shade of the non-visited link colour. And please, do make the visited link colour different from the normal links colour. The feature is there for a reason.
2. Keep the design continuous
   A well-accepted idea is to keep one design the whole way through your site, and do not sway from it. You may think this would lead to a more boring, monotonous site; but in practical use this is a very simple way to keep everything easy to use, because everything is consistent. When a user moves to a new page they shouldn't have to immediately figure out a new way of moving around. Plus, it reassures them that they have not moved away from what they were reading without their knowledge.
3. Only underline links
   Don't underline text that isn't a link. You'll just confuse people. If you need to emphasise some text, use bold, italics or colour.

Negative aspects of Navigation
It is when designers go overboard on navigation that a problem arises. Too many links overwhelm readers and they then skip over most of them in an effort not to waste time reading a lot of irrelevant stuff. There is no need to link to every other page on your site from any page (with the exception of an index). This approach will hinder a reader more than aid them.

If you aim to give a group of links at the end of a page, say; don't pick random or (un)popular links, pick ones which are relevant or linked (in subject) to the information that is being read at that moment. Readers are much more likely to be interested in them and therefore click on.

Credit*: This was pointed out by Jakob Nielson on his » AlertBox site.

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