Navigation on a Website
Derek Powazek has published on A List Apart, an article about website navigation. Three guidelines are given:
- Don’t ever, ever link to the page you’re on.
- Show where you are.
- Think before you link.
Personally, I am not following any of these guidelines and you can experience for yourself. This is highly due to laziness, but I don’t believe that fact makes anybody lose their senses.
The first two guidelines are excellent and they should be applied on every single website, especially number 2. The third guideline is just silly. It might as well have been the only guideline.
Finally, the article only talks about global navigation. I have read many blog articles and I have seen authors linking twice to the same web page in the same post or even the same paragraph. Now, that’s just confusing. I don’t know what that second link is for and it’s definitely not to put the accent on anything because clicking either links displays the exact same thing.
Navigation is definitely important. Content is also important, but completely useless if there is no simple and easy way to get to it.
