Website Navigation: Seek and Ye May Find

The single characteristic that sets the Internet apart from other resources is the hyperlink, the ability to move instantly to related but remote subject matter. Most website designers regard navigation as an obligatoryl addon that will probably never be fully used and therefore give it cursory attention.

Chief culprit is the 'never visited' link that doesn't change colour when it has been visited - a simple coding matter and yet irritates the visitor when he unintentionally returns to the same page for the third time.

Another mistake is to use Javascript navigation. Although the doodads are fancy, because the links are remote from the website no search engine can follow them so as far as it is concerned, it is looking at a single page and will not index any of your other pages. This why many sites that use it also have a bunch of plain text links at the bottom of the pages.

Web pages are an integral part of the entire website and should tell a story. Navigation should not be arbitrarily chopped up just to provide navigation.