What’s on the menu?
When asked, I recommend people have no more than seven links in their site’s navigation. More than seven links risks overloading visitors with choices and makes designers think about the best ways to organise their content.
But that’s just me. Does my advice fit the current trend in web design? I took a small survey of New Zealand business web sites to find out.
To gather data, I looked at the first two unique web sites in each category of Finda, a popular New Zealand site directory, orderd by rank, that I had not worked on before. If a company appeared in two categories, I skipped the duplicate and used the next company in the second category.
Terminology
- Primary navigation bar: A group of links that appear on every page in the entire site. These groups are designed to direct visitors to either the most important information on the site, the different types of information on the site, or both. (For my survey, I did not include product categories that appear on all pages unless the site had no other navigation.)
- Sub-navigation bar: A group of links that changes within each different section of the site. Such groups may or may not “drop down” when the visitor hovers over a link in the primary navigation bar.
- Shape: Navigation bars tend to come in horizontal rows or vertical stacks.
- Link type: The element being clicked, whether a graphic, bit of HTML, or something else.
- Clickable logo: Most business sites place the company’s logo in a consistent place on every page. The logo may or may not be a clickable link.
Results
- The survey looked at 67 navigation bars on 56 sites.
- The bars had a calculated average of 7.46 links. The most common number of links per bar was seven.
- 20 bars, almost two-thirds, used text links. Ten bars used clickable images. One bar used Flash and one bar form buttons.
- Only 10 of the bars, about one-third, were vertical. The other 22 were horizontal. All of the vertical bars were positioned on the left side of their sites. All of the horizontal bars were at the top.
- 15 incorporated clickable logos, while 16 of the logos were not clickable. One had no logo.
- 15 had sub-navigation bars, 17 did not.
I was surprised that less than half of the sites had clickable logos, as most of my clients request their logos to be clickable. If the assumption is that logos take you to the home page, then that idea isn’t reflected in NZ business sites (or not in the sites I looked at).
Text links may be popular for several reasons: You can change them without a graphics program; search engines follow them better than other kinds of links; and they’re quick to load. Images, on the other hand, often look better than text if they’re well-crafted. Flash links often prevent search engines from scanning a site. The best Flash navigation I’ve seen actually hid the links among cartoons on the pages””a creative approach if your goal is to make the site challenging or playful.
The one site that used form buttons did so with a bit of embedded JavaScript. I don’t know if search engines would follow such navigation, but I’d guess not. I’ve never seen Google try to access pages with parts of their file names outside of HTML proper.
Conclusion
But what about my first question: Do sites use seven or fewer links in their main navigation? By design or chance, most of the bars did. But barely. Seventeen of the 32 bars used seven or fewer links. Twelve did not. Thirteen, just over one-third, used either six or seven links. The average, 8.34, was higher than my limit of seven due to a few in the high teens or twenties. The chart to the right gives a breakdown.
I plan to keep recommending 5-7 links for the same reasons as before. But in the future I might experiment with the logo. Link to the site map instead of the home page? Clicking hides or reveals the navigation to save space? Roll-over reveals contact details?
Hmm. That’s worth some thought.