Webmaster 101

The importance of a proper navigation system and its use in furthering the cause of your site has been dealt with in previous blogs. Just for freshening up your memory, a navigation bar is the only source through which visitors come to know of the most important pages on your site and it is also the easiest way to let visitors move across the pages of your website. This blog shall enlist the most prominent locations to place your navigational elements and bar and the advantages and disadvantages of each location. The only possible locations to place a navigation bar are top, bottom, left and right taken in detail below:

Top menu

A top menu is mostly placed directly under the header graphic containing the site logo or flash promo, some webmasters place them on top of the page to ensure maximum visibility. Top of the page menus are usually single links that directly take you to the page they are named after. However in large websites these may double up as drop down menus or expanding menus that drop down or expand when u take your mouse over them.

Left Side Navigation

Mostly preferred in professional sites a left side navigation is usually a column on the extreme left side of a page and everything else, including functionality and linking is similar to the top menu.

Right Side Navigation

Right side navigation was not into use until blogs came in, with the popularity of blogs and the popular right side navigation that comes with default in WordPress Blogs many webmaster began adding navigation menus on the right for giving a casual look to their website.

Bottom Menus

Bottom Menus are usually added to the footer of a site and usually are text only.

Filed under: Website Design