Effective Web Navigation

If people cannot navigate through your site, they will quickly leave. Thus, designing effective navigation on your Web site is important. But there are some basic things you need to do before you can start worrying about links, images or flash.
Information Architecture
Before you can even start to plan your navigation, you need to define your site's information architecture. Information architecture is the structure of your Web site.
Some common taxonomy elements on a corporate or business Web page are: Products, About Us, Favorite Links,etc.
Organization
Once you've determined your site architecture, you need to decide how to organize it. You might have it all live in one directory, and just link to the major pages from your front page. Or you might have all the sub-pages separated into directories.
Navigation Design
Once you have an idea of the architecture and organization, you're ready to think about the design of the navigation. There are several things you should consider in deciding on your navigation design:

The navigation of your site is possibly the most important part of any given page. So it should be as accessible as you can make it. This means avoiding special effects like Flash, Java, or JavaScript as your only navigation method.
Keep your navigation meaningful. Have clear links - don't try to use terms that are internal to your organization. Someone who has never been to your site before should know immediately where the link will take them.
Navigation should understandable. If you want to use images for your navigation, make sure that there is some text associated with them. Your navigation should appear on every page of your site.

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