Help People Find Themselves

When you open a door inside a building, it's easy to tell if you're entering another room in the same building or if you're going outside. It should be equally obvious to your users whether they have moved from one of your pages to another, or if they've clicked out of your site entirely.

If users miss your front page because they arrive via a search engine or a remote link, they should be able to figure out where they've landed. Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have a few suggestions for providing context within your Web site.

Establish Your Identity

Everyone hates those "Hello, My Name Is" stickers, but they're helpful when you're faced with a crowd of strangers. Similarly, in a sea of strange Web pages, it helps to have the name of your organization on every page of your site.

You could put it in the title or header of the page, or include a small company logo on every page. That way, if someone stumbles onto one of your pages through a search engine, or is handed a photocopy of your page that's missing the URL, he has some context. When all your pages share a particular graphic or overall look, users can also tell when they've left your site.

It's All Relative

Jennifer Fleming reminds us that "navigation should appear in context." In other words, most "back" links are useless (not to mention superfluous, considering the browser's Back button). A "back" link will never work if the user has come from another site, or even another part of your site. You can make a "back" link work by being specific, for instance, "go back to my front page" or "go back to the table of contents."

You Are Here

Rosenfeld and Morville suggest that your navigation system show the structure of your site's hierarchy, and indicate where each specific page dwells within that hierarchy. Their example is this page from the Argus Clearinghouse. It's clear that the hierarchy that brought you to that page looks like this: Search/Browse -> Main Page -> Government & Law -> Intellectual Property.

Yahoo also clearly shows you the levels of hierarchy that brought you to a particular page. This page shows you the hierarchy that leads to Yahoo's "O'Reilly and Associates" page: Top -> Business and Economy -> Companies -> Publishing -> O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.

You might also design your navigation bar to give visual clues about your user's location. Click to the next page in this series, Tip #5 Global Navigation Systems, for some ideas.