Finding your Way Around
While you are busy designing your site layout and sorting out the exact details of your site's content, make sure that you don't neglect the most important aspect of your site. Navigation should be high up on the list of site priorities, after all, even if your promotion campaign is successful it is of little use if your navigation is non-existent and your visitors are left stranded on the page they came to!
A good navigation system will give the user three important pieces of information. Where they are. Where they were. Where they can go.
Where am I?
To answer this question your visitor will look for clues on your pages; a quick glance at logos, titles and menus can go a long way to help the visitor find their bearings. Knowing where you are in relation to a site and the internet as a whole goes a long way to interpreting the context of the page. Web site owners know they are unlikely to find any design tips if the site they are looking at looks like an auction site!
The overall look of your page is important if they have just come from another page on your site as if it is radically different to what they were expecting then they will begin to wonder why. If your visitors are unable to find anything that reminds them of your site, or even anything related to what they were looking for, then they may become disorientated and just hit the back button to a more familiar page.
This is why it is important to have some element of consistency from one page on your site to the next; even if it is just a small logo that is always in the top corner, it can do a lot to help reassure your visitors that they are still at your site. It is also a good idea to have a title that is relevant to the page topic display prominently at the top of the page, as this will be one of the clues that tell your visitor they have found what they are looking for.
For a more specific "you are here" sign you can use the style of your navigational links to your advantage. I do this here at Web Site Owner, just take a look at the side menu and you will see that the link you could have followed to get here has been highlighted. When pages are grouped together in this way and they are sorted in the order you would recommend that they should be read, you can provide yet another clue by adding next and previous links to others in the sequence, helping to reinforce the recommended reading order.
Another common way of using site navigation to let users know where they are is known as the breadcrumb trail. This type of navigation allows visitors to move between more general and more specific topics with ease by providing links that act as shortcuts to each of the levels that make up a topic (again for another example, look at the link in the tan bar just below our logo). This kind of navigation is great for helping to set the context, and works particularly well when the content of the site as a whole can be put into categories and sub-categories; which makes it a common feature of search directories.
Where was I?
While it may not seem all that important to let your visitors know where they have been, it can be very frustrating to click a link only to find that you've already been there! This is one of the reasons why you should take care when choosing the colour schemes for your links in your style sheets, ideally you should try to leave your links as close to the default colours of blue and purple as possible. If the colour for your visited links is too similar to the colour for the one that haven't been visited, it is sure to cause some confusion.
Another way you can help your visitors know where they have been is to group your pages together, so that all related pages are accessible using a single, but consistent, text menu. When the default link colours (or other suitable link colour scheme) are used visitors will be able to tell at a glance all the related pages they have visited already.
Where can I go?
Where your visitor will want to go once they've been to one of your pages will depend on the result; did they find what they were looking for?
Users that have found the information that they were looking for may wish to leave the site in search of even more information on the chosen topic, particularly if the page didn't go into any specific detail. This is where links to other related sites (even competitors sites) will come in useful. While you may loose a visitor to these links, you are essentially providing an extra level of service (after all, you will have saved them the time they would have spend searching for similar pages to yours). Providing such cross-references to sites and products that are relevant to yours could work in the longer term, as it can improve the credibility of your site.
When a user finds some of the information that they were looking for, they may want to see if there are other related links on your site before they go elsewhere. The usual place you expect to find related links would be within the text of the page itself, or maybe even at the bottom after the discussion as optional extras. Other likely candidates for the next page to visit would be those in the site menus, particularly if a link clearly belongs to a group of pages.
There will obviously be times when your visitors are unable to find what they are looking for anywhere on the page. At times like these your visitors are most likely to look for the nearest search box, so it is something that you should consider providing. Search facilities are a great way of providing shortcuts between unrelated topics on your site without the need for links. Of course, some sites will not be large enough to warrant their own search engine, and so a search box that allows your visitors to search the internet from your own site could be an alternative.
Even if you do not want to add any kind of search engine to your site, then you should at least consider linking all copies of your logo back to the main page; that way, even if your visitors happen to get "lost" they will always be able to find their way to your home page.
Reading the Signs
The design and colour schemes for your logo, links and menus go a long way in helping your user find out exactly where they are on the web. Imagine the problems you would have when visiting a strange city or town that had no street signs. Visitors unfamiliar to your site will want to read your site's signs, so don't hide them away!