Web Design- Uniformity and Navigation scheme

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.

A navigation bar

A navigation bar can give readers immediate knowledge of the depth of your site. Just glancing over your navigation links should give them an idea of what's on offer and what's here that they definitely want to see. Having a fully-featured navigation bar assures the reader that there's lots to see and do, and encourages them to explore a little bit.

Primary navigation

Primary navigation must be clear, structured and intuitive. This means breaking your site’s subject areas into categories and groups and presenting them in the most logical way possible. Commonly found to the side or at the top of a layout, primary navigation should hold 4–15 links to the main sections of your site. Any more and you’ll overwhelm people. Enclose your navigational links into small groupings of four or five links at a time, with headings so that scanning your navigation bar can be performed faster.
Remember that the majority of your visitors will not land on your homepage — they’ll often arrive on a page deep within your site from a search engine — and therefore must be able to pick up your navigation immediately.

Secondary navigation

Secondary navigation will usually include commonplace links like contact, about us and copyright information. These sort of things should be left out of your primary navigation, and placed at the bottom of a page, freeing up your main navigation areas for the important stuff.

Links between the pages of your site

Links between the pages of your site in the content of the page are the final way to tie your pages together. Whenever you write about something that is discussed elsewhere in your site, you should make the relevant words into a link to the other pages. This makes related content available when it is most relevant, and encourages visitors to read more.