Navigation System Principles
A good site always put visitor needs as first priority. Whether it only contain several pages or lots of it, you should allow the visitors move freely on all of your pages, and most important all the navigation text are clearly visible and easy to be found.
One other thing, although a simple text navigation menu very functional and accessible, it appears kind of boring. Consider using more complex menu, usually comes from some combination of text, graphics, CSS, and possibly even JavaScript or some other programming language to handle its dynamic functionality, such as giving the menu cool-looking rollover buttons or drop-down menus.
The navigation on a site needs to provide a simple route to all the most important pages on the site. How that route looks and functions is the key role of the navigation system. Discuss it with your client about the location of the navigation menu should be placed, to avoid silent reaction from your client, its a good idea preparing two or more solutions, by the time you get there, you just give him an option of your solutions. If the navigation menu also requires subnavigation, be sure you discuss it first with your client how and where the subnavigation items will be displayed. Because your clients needs will kept your relationship and grow your skills.
The important principle in Web design navigation is visitor should be able to find what he or she is looking for in the few of clicks. There are two design of navigation menu that is either wide or deep, depending on the number of main navigation links in the menu:
Wide.
A wide menu refers to a navigation system that lists links to all the main pages on a site in a single horizontal row.
If the site is rather small, having four to seven main navigation links across the page might be a suitable solution. On the other hand, for a site that has 10 main pages, there is probably no visually appealing way to list all 10 links in a single horizontal row. You could try breaking the links into two rows of seven, but that might confuse site visitors unless
careful attention was paid to the design and layout. Alternatively, you could present the wide menu to visitors as a single vertical list of navigation buttons. However, the large number of main pages is the result of client’s failure to organize content, help your client rethink the architecture in terms of a deep navigation menu system instead.
Deep
To reduce numbers of main navigation links, by using deep menu, all the pages are grouped into categories, which can be displayed either horizontally or vertically on the pages. Each category has a main page (such as About Us) and one or
more subpages (such as Company History, Board of Directors, and Our Sponsors) that can be accessed through some kind of customized subnavigation menu system.
Subnavigation menus can either pop up, drop down, or fly out from the main menu, its all depends on the orientation of the main navigation menu. For instance, the subnavigation might be displayed as a second row of links that appears below the first row of links when activated by the main navigation link for that group, or perhaps it might be displayed as a sidebar area that only appears somewhere on the page when activated by the main navigation link of that category.