Navigation

Navigation is what people use to get to different areas of your site. Navigation for a websites includes the menu systems (top and left menu's), site search, and sitemap. Site Builder 3.0 automatically creates a sitemap and Google is used for the site search. After adding content it may take a day or two before Google adds your new content to their search. The Left and Top Navigation can be edited to suit the needs of your site.

Good Navigation

The benefits of good navigation allow visitors to find your content with ease, provides a simple logical structure in how the site is put together, and even makes it easier to maintain the site. Good Navigation is not easy to do and it requires much thought. This is especially true when sites grow to be very large. In setting up your site a little thought and re-structuring can go a long way in in helping to simplify the navigation on your site.

The idea here is the simpler the better. Overly complex navigation creates clutter many visitors to your site will not even bother reading, much less trying to "click around" and find something buried in your site.

There are many different ways to reach the goal of good navigation. This usually involves categorizing the information found on pages and grouping pages by their categories. 

Poor Navigation

Poor Navigation can be very confusing for people visiting your site. This alone can turn people away from good content. Poor Navigation makes it difficult to find your content. Having content that is hard to find is counter productive. So spending some time to work on the navigation and make it simple and logical is well worth the effort.

Top and Left Navigation Menus

The different Navigation Menus have their own purposes and limitations. The Top Navigation is severely limited in space and better for administrative links. While the Left Navigation is better at showing long lists of links and menus that change for each page, but administrative links can be hard to find in long lists.

Left Navigation

The Left Navigation is the best place for "programmatic" links. Programmatic links would be the main content of your site. Depending on your site the type of content can vary greatly. However, all sites can follow a similar format in grouping the Left Navigation links logically and in an order that is easy to find. Follow the link below for more information on creating a useful Left Navigation.

Left Navigation

Top Navigation

The Top Navigation is the best place for "administrative" links. Administrative links are common to almost all sites. These are links like "About us", "Contact Us", "Site Comments", or anything else that is site-wide. The Top Navigation should not contain links that are in the Left Navigation. The Top Navigation is also very limited in space so only a few links should be used. Adding too many links in the Top Navigation can make it hard to find links, as it looks like one long run-on sentence. The Top Navigation allows for Dropdown Navigation menu's to help with avoiding clutter. However, we do not recommend using the Dropdown Navigation feature as they tend to create a confusing menu structure. To find out more about Top Navigation follow th link below.

Top Navigation