Ensure your links are easily distinguishable from the background and surrounding text by always making them underlined. Users expect underlined texts to be a link; and links to be underlined.
The way your inbound links are worded makes a big difference. They play an important factor for search engine results and for the users.
Having descriptive links with relevant words boosts your website SEO, improves accessibility, and gives a more friendly experience to all users.
Distinguishing visited links is very helpful to show where users have been before. Visited links should still stand out but not as obvious as unvisited ones. This is default on most browsers, but after adding custom styling to your website, you may need to include it.
The active menu item should stand out from the others. This way you make it easy for users to know where they are at in the website.
So you started your site with simple navigation but then you find yourself a few years later with site navigation that is saturated with links and everything looks messy.
Mega menu allows you to present your links in groups and make use of typography, icons and supporting images to explain user's choices.
Hamburger menus are everywhere. They are popular and they declutter mobile UIs but the downside is that the menu items are less discoverable and require an extra click.
Keeping a breadcrumb trail on every page is necessary. It is a navigation tool so users can easily locate themselves and find what they are looking for quickly. But don't link a page to itself!
Integrating a breadcrumb trail on webpages brings these benefits:
Breadcrumbs are an essential part of website navigation, providing users with a trail of links to indicate their location within a site's hierarchy. To maximize their effectiveness, it's important to keep breadcrumbs short and concise. By simplifying them, we reduce confusion and make them easier to understand, improving the overall user experience.
Breadcrumbs guide users through your website interactions. They are important as they give the user a sense of confidence in using your application. The user will tend to feel lost and unsure of what to do next if a application does not guide them properly. Good navigation through directional headings removes this feeling and gives the user confidence. This rule is especially important when it comes to design an e-commerce check out process, or a software set up wizard.
When redirecting users to another page, make sure that the text is consistent between the two pages.
It's a good idea to make sure your page names are consistent between:
When a user clicks a hyperlink, they expect a webpage to open. If they click on a link that is actually a .doc/.docx file, they might encounter the unexpected experience of having Microsoft Word open in the background.
When creating links, you should follow a few basic rules:
External links should open in a new tab (by using HTML's target="_blank"). Since browsers implemented tabs (replacing new window), it's considered a good practice to open external links in a different tab.
It is generally advisable to avoid using absolute internal links whenever possible. Absolute links include the full URL, including the domain name, when linking to internal pages within the same website.
Using absolute internal links can lead to challenges during website migration or domain name changes. If the website's domain or URL structure is modified, all absolute links within the website would require updating. This can be a time-consuming and error-prone process, potentially resulting in broken links and a negative user experience.
There are certain links on a website which you want to make VERY simple for users to find. I hate hunting around on a site for a phone numbers. These are the basics which should be easily accessible from every page:
A web page should not be more than 4 levels deep. Use a drop-down menu to help users get to these pages quicker. For larger site, you may want to consider mega dropdown menu.
There is no point of having a web page if it is too hard for the user to access from the main menu or from multiple links on your site.
Often a page has duplicated links pointing to the same page - all fairly close to each other, like in 1 or 2 paragraphs. It is a good idea to avoid having multiple links to the exact same page section, because they:
A link on a page that takes you to the very same page is a weird experience. Don't include a link to the page you are on.
The attribute "name" allows you to link to specific places within the page, via the <a> tag.
This is especially useful in long pages that can be separated into sections. You can create a named anchor in each of these section headings to provide "jump-to" functionality. In other words, you can have a different URL for each piece of content on the same page.