Hand Crafting Your Navigation

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Like most everyone else I started building websites 100% static. After all, it is only natural to learn HTML before PHP and CSS. Soon after, I ran into some real problems with my information architecture. I had 20 static files (1 per page) and I had to make a change to the navigation so that meant going through and editing all 20 files. Then 10 minutes later I didn’t like that change so I had to go back and undo all my work.

It didn’t take long before the mighty PHP includes came to the rescue. It was so obvious, all I had to do was put all my site wide elements into includes and suddenly I could edit 20 pages at once. For a long time reusing as much code/content as possible was my standard. It still is, at least code wise, but now an SEO demon has crawled into my head. Now I realize that monolithic navigations rubber stamped site wide are functional but not ideal.

The perfect navigation, at least in my mind, is one that is hand crafted to meet the individual needs of every page without sacrificing usability. Apparently this is an absurd idea because almost every site I see uses a single site wide, monolithic navigation as a base. Then most sites make up for this a little by contextual linking.

I know that a 100% semantic navigation isn’t practical or usable in most cases. I simply think site wide links should be at an absolute premium and at no time should any site have more than 5-10. If your site is so large as to require more than 10 silos then seriously consider breaking it down into 2 or more sites. (possibly using subdomains)

Then once you get your premium site wide links figured out craft the remainder of your links by hand. It might seem like a lot of trouble but your internal link structure is extremely important. As far as onsite factors go I would rank it right behind content volume and quality. Far more important than optimizing meta data. If you take the time to plan out your site you will save a ton of time on this task.

by Dane Lyons