Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Navigation - our visitors travel guide (22 Sep 2005) Navigation is one of the most important parts of the site; however, the most important part of a page is the content. If our navigation grabs the visitors' attention and distracts from the content, then it failed its purpose. The content should determine the navigation, not the other way around. This is easy to forget, as navigation is one of the few things us web developers and designers can play with. At the start of the project we have a rough idea of the sitemap, whereas the content is not always ready or even planned out. It is up to us to tell the client that the content is what people will look for and come for, not how cool or usable the navigation is. The best navigations on the web are the ones we cannot remember, but pointed us quickly to the right place. If there is a lot of time and budget to be spent, then it should go into proper search functionality and defensive measures - the error pages, warning messages and information pages, not a singing and dancing navigation. Article URL: http://evolt.org/navigation Read 97 more articles from evolt sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Broadband Adoption in the United States: Growing but Slowing          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy