Navigating Your Way Through HTML Waters

I mentioned in my last post that planning is a very important part of any web design project, for several reasons. One of those reasons is the ability to set up a site's structure so that search engines will be able to properly spider the content and list your site's pages.

You may have written a fantastic piece of copy about Corinthian leather, only for it to be lost in cyberspace because it is not properly linked to within your site.

For small business owners, not having your site indexed and listed correctly can be a virtual death sentence.

So, if you have more than one page on your web site you are going to have links to other pages and thus need a navigation system to make it easy for your visitors to find information.

The Nav System
You know how GPS makes driving through a new city a real time saver? Well that's what your site's nav system will do for visitors to your virtual neck of the woods. A menu is the main component, so how do you want it to look - vertical or horizontal? Vertical? Okay - left side or right side? Horizontal? Do you have lots of links? Yes, well then you will need an expandable menu...

You get the idea.

You can get a lot of links going vertically and not need to get into any kind of expandable menu, which can be made with Cascading Style Sheets [CSS]. Here's a web site where you can make your own CSS menu - it's pretty cool. If you sign up you can make lots of menus and store them online.

I have found that one of the best ways to plan a site's structure is to get a batch of Post-it notes and write the page name/menu item on them. Then sticking them on a wall just reposition them as you need to, create duplicates as needed to identify if some pages will need to go in any sub menus also - like 'contact us'.

What you need to remember as you plan your menu structure, is that as your site is designed the menu system must be a constant: you don't want to have the menu on the left on some pages, the right on others. This confuses visitors. Keep you nav system the same on all pages [much easier if you are using a content management system - CMS].

And finally, you need a site map so that search robots and spiders can locate all the pages on your site. If you want Google to get all your pages you can easily create a site map in XML and upload the link to Google and just let them do what they know best.