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Breadcrumb Frame Menu


 

Menus & Navigation

Primary navigation bars provide shortcuts to main sections on a website and are displayed on most or all pages. A "navigation bar" is a row or column of important links that anchors each page, helping to keep the reader from getting lost.

Navigation bars or menus can remain consistent throughout the site or can change on every page. The most prevalent problems with navigation bars are due to menus that don't match the user's expectation of the subject and a lack of contextual information, which could be delivered in a few words if space was available. For instance, users in a product section who see a navigation bar linking to customers is likely to wonder what is meant by the word - is it a list of customer references or login for existing customers?

Creating good navigation on a larger website (more than about 7 pages) involves grouping your content logically, so that your visitors will be able to find what they are looking for.  Viewers won't always start at the "home" page.  They may follow a search engine directly to an internal page, or they may follow a link from another website, where the webmaster posted a link to information somewhere on your site.

Navigation bars come in a variety of flavors:

A top menu or side menu on all pages directs the view around the website and enables them to maintain a sense of where they are. Both of these are located on these pages.

A breadcrumb trail is a special kind of navigation bar, featuring a hierarchical row of links (click Breadcrumb above), each of which represents a "node" (a point at which the reader makes a decision). A breadcrumb is usually found on the individual page and is not part of the menu structure. 

A Frame Menu is a navigation bar that is located on a separate side or top frame which remains while the main page changes its content. This format has largely been discontinued in web design due to inherent problems with search engines and navigation to internal pages.

A Button Menu is a navigation bar that is a graphic image, rather than just text links. This enables the sites graphic style to carry over to the menu.

 
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