How to Design the Best Navigation Bar for Your Website

[snakeair]

Mashable has a good story for the designers to read as a reminder when you are creating or modifing websites.

The navigation bar is the most important design element on a website. Not only does it guide your users to pages beyond the homepage, but it’s also the singular tool to give users a sense of orientation. With this in mind, it’s important to adhere to time-tested design and usability conventions. Doing so will give your users a comfortable and easy reference point to fully engage with your content.

Despite the necessity of an accessible navigation bar, usability studies on navigation across the web aren’t positive. One study by User Interface Engineering shows that people cannot find the information they seek on a website about 60% of the time. While this failure rate might be acceptable for your average blog, a business website simply cannot afford these stats. Even worse, many users often find navigation usability extremely frustrating, citing annoying...

Continued at: http://mashable.com/2011/12/08/design-navigation-bar/

Please share your thoughts.

[GMF]

Keep it simple

Most important thing in the whole article. If your nav is bloated, confusing etc. why should I bother staying at your site?

[indybail]

Call to action on the right and information on the left? Interesting, but I haven't heard this before.

Anybody have any experiences or articles that could further educate me? Thanks.