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In the early days of the web, the "home page",
which comes up first when you arrive at the site, would be the jumping
off point from which you could reach any information on another
part of the website. Once you arrived at your chosen page, you'd
typically then have to press HOME to return to where you started,
before selecting a new page. This system does suffer from the problem
that you're always retracing your steps, and involves a lot of un-necessary
clicking.
Over the last few years, websites have tended
to feature common navigation elements, that is, on each page of
the site there is a set of controls which enable you to get to any
other page. This obviously presents a challenge, especially with
large sites. There might be 30 or 40 other places to go on your
site, but you don't want to reserve too much space for navigation
controls, because this is at the expense of your actual site content!
Here are a few ideas for navigation. It's always possible to provide
more than one way of browsing a site - this can be an advantage
because different people may be used to different ways of browsing.
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Flat toolbar
 On
a fairly simple site, a toolbar containing buttons for each
page is perhaps the simplest and most well known way of getting
around a site. These are most usually placed on the left hand
side of the screen, but can also appear horizontally across
the top of the screen. For a more striking and unusual effect,
toolbars can be placed on the right hand side, or across the
bottom, but these options can cause difficulties for those with
small screens, eg laptop users. We generally reckon that a good
number of items on this type of toolbar is around 6 - 10. Why
no more? Well the more choices you provide, the less likely
people are to think carefully about what to click on - instead,
they may end up clicking on something more or less at random,
and finding themselves dead-ending in an uninteresting part
of the site. If your site is quite large, you may want to consider
the next option.
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Hierarchical toolbar
 For
larger sites, dividing the pages up into site sections is
a natural development. For instance, if your company has offices
in 20 countries, you might want to list them under Europe,
Asia and America. Or if you have a large range of computer
products you might want to list them under hardware, software
and accessories. For the reasons listed above, we generally
reckon that about 5 or 6 top-level choices are a good idea.
Typical headings would usually be very generic sounding, such
as Products, Support, Members, etc... The Room101 hierarchical
menu, used on most of our busiest sites, works similarly to
the familiar files listings found in Microsoft Windows - clicking
on a top-level menu choice opens up that option to display
all the sub-menu choices listed under that category. Because
some people will know exactly what they're looking for on
your site, our hierarchical menu system also provides a handy
site map feature, which displays all the pages on your site
at a glance. When we designed this menu system, we made sure
it was easy to add, move and remove items. This is because
many of our busier sites are adding new sections frequently.
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Drop-down menu
 Although
less intuitive, a drop-down menu is a very compact way of
navigating the site, and can take up an area no taller than
2 or 3 lines of text. It is also simpler to add and remove
items, from a design point of view. If your site is designed
to take 5 top level menu buttons across the top of the screen,
adding a sixth one may not be very straight-forward, as it
may require shrinking the existing buttons to fit the new
one in, whereas the drop down menu takes up the same space
regardless of how many choices it has on it. It's also possible
to have a hierarchical drop-down menu. This type of navigation
is often used in combination with conventional menu systems,
to give the user more than one way of navigating the site,
but can be used singly, if space on your web pages is at a
premium.
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