As a web designer, it is important that you design a website with an appropriate navigation menu. This is one of the elements that either enhances or weakens the user experience. Your website should not only be visually appealing but also highly functional. Beautiful designing and excellent marketing will get you huge amount of traffic but, only great navigation and functionality will retain your visitors. To make your website highly functional, you can hire the best website designers in Bangalore who have an expertise in the most basic elements of web design, of which effective navigation is an important part. Here are some of the most essential and effective navigation patterns that will be in trend in 2016.
Mega drop-down menus
If you have immense amount of content and categories of your products/services, like that of eCommerce stores, mega drop-down menu navigation is going to be great for you, where you have huge drop-down panels that open up additional layers of navigation to help users find what they want more specifically and easily. This kind of navigation has an orderly structure of content. It eliminates the scrolling and pagination pattern, which may otherwise annoy the users.
Sticky navigation
This type of navigation stays locked in place even when users scroll down the page. This helps the users to instantly access the menu and easily navigate to wherever they want to, without having to scroll back right to the top of the page to find the menu bar. In case of long pages, it gets very frustrating for users to scroll all the way up to navigate to another page on the site. Here, sticky navigation becomes highly helpful. Other than being helpful, sticky navigation also reduces cognitive load on the users by having their navigation choices right in front of them all the time. This is highly important because users want the best speed while surfing the Web; so this navigation pattern will have them find the content they desire very quickly.
Symbols in the menu
You may use a conventional symbol in your navigation menu that a majority of site visitors can relate to. For example, for your home page you can use a house icon, a camera icon for your gallery page and a shopping cart for your products page. These are symbols that almost everyone visiting the page would understand. This type of navigation will provide creativity and design to your website and will also let you fit in lots of elements in your menu bar.
Hypertext
Hypertext is the text displayed with references to other text or links that users can immediately access. Users can click on these hypertexts to get immediate additional information on another page. There are two ways in which hypertexts can be made noticeable – by underlining or changing the colour. Whichever of the two ways you use; it will make the text stand out on the page and immediately draws the attention of visitors, making it easily identifiable and helping the users to navigate to important information very easily.
