Plan Layout
Now the interesting part. Sketch out on a piece of paper the rough layout of your average page, making sure
to incorporate enough space for sets of links, content etc.
This phase is about managing the trade-off between having space to make a site look beautiful, and having space
to actually have content on the site. Both are needed since and ugly site is hard to use, but equally a site
with nothing but eye-candy is unlikely to hold a person's long term attention span.
My preferred method is to draw boxes defining the separate areas and then label them, making sure to leave
enough space to allow myself to make notes in the margin about what needs to happen to make this do something
when the user clicks on this link over here.
Plan Navigation
Now you know what it looks like, or at least what you want it to look like! Hopefully if you did a reasonable
job when planning the last few areas that is what it should end up looking like too.
Right... on with the task in hand - did you manage to identify consistently placed sets of links? Things like
links to allow easier navigation, links to allow the viewer to contact you etc. can be considered navigation
as they allow the user to navigate around the pages far easier than just having randomly linked words inside
the content ever could.
There are three main types of navigation each with their own advantages and disadvantages, the types are
narrative, contained and framed.
Narrative navigation is simply putting adhoc links against a piece of text, it is best suited to sites
which do not really suit having a fixed set of links which are suitable for helping the user navigate
around the site.
This method is perhaps the easiest to implement since it does not require any additional
work aside from making sure all your links work and ensuring that all the pages are capable of being reached.
The downside is that this method is not really suited to a site which is large since maintenance on something
this size is a nightmare, not to mention that users want an easy way to find content / sections without having
to resort to their own bookmarks.
Contained navigation is defining a set area on each page where the navigation links will appear, these
links are actually part of the same page as the content so essentially you are separating the navigation from
the content which makes maintenance easier, not to mention it means that the end users will find it far easier
to find where they are going.
This method provides a balance between ease-of-creation and ease-of-maintenance as it is trivial to create a
separate area on each page to embed your links inside, and once there you should be able to replicate that
method across all the pages, modifing the links as needed. The downside is that maintenance can still be an
issue if you decide to restyle the pages or rename a page and you need to go through and update all the affected
pages.
Framed navigation is probably one of the most effective navigation building methods around, but people
tend to shy away from it because of the amounts of times they have seen ugly framed sites that are very clearly
a framed site and not at all elegant, not to mention that they are a little more daunting to start working with
since you need to set a few things up before you can make them work the way you want to.
Frames are the next step on from contained navigation because they allow you to totally separate your navigation
links from the content - meaning less data makes up each page of content which in turns means faster loading,
easier maintenance and a set of navigation which is always visible. Quite a few sites use frames, mine included
and frankly you don't notice frames unless you know what to look for or they are badly implemented, if done well
the benefits of framing far outweighs any disadvantages.
This method is the ultimate in ease-of-maintenance and allows for smaller pages, which are easier to maintain
as well as allowing navigation to always be visible. The downside is that they are tricky to get just right,
although all that is required is a little effort, but linked to that is the fact that if you are not careful
you can easily lose most of your content-space to a badly designed navigation frame.
No style of navigation is perfect for everyone, that is a simple fact of life however once you know your needs
you should be able to identify which class your needs fall into and from there which style is a sensible choice
to persue.