Choosing a navigation menu for your website is something you need to think carefully about. Going for the coolest and most elaborate navigation system is not always the best idea. It may look fantastic, but it may not be search engine friendly or user friendly.

If possible try to keep your menu text-only and dress it up with a nice background, smart font and maybe a change of colour/background when you hover. Simple text menus, either horizontal or vertical, are really user friendly and all the search engines can follow the links to find your pages. Look at most blogs and popular websites, pretty much basic text links for all navigation.

CNET is a good example of a website that uses text navigation with a simple hover change.

There are times when you need something a little more than basic text navigation, especially if you have a lot of pages or you are trying to get every page linked on every page. This was the challenge when we came to re-design UK Link Exchange.

We wanted to make sure that pretty much every page was accessible from every page but this would make a simple text navigation menu much too big. We decided that a nice drop down menu would be a good idea to run horizontally across the top of the page. But it needed to be search engine and user friendly plus easy to update and change.

TIP: Always have your menu as a server side include file. Pretty much all web hosts let you use them nowadays and they are really easy to implement in PHP, ASP or .NET. You’ll only have 1 page to change when your menu needs updating.

We searched around and finally found an excellent menu on one of my favourite websites, DynamicDrive.

The menu is CSS based and uses a little bit of javascript but stays search engine friendly. Its probably one of the easiest menus to implement and because it uses CSS the colours and sizes can be altered by making small changes to the style sheet. It also works fine in pretty much all Internet browsers including Internet Explorer and Firefox.

As you can see from the image above the menu looks great and offers drop drown lists so that all pages can be accessed from all pages and its also been styled to match our new design.

The new style for UK Link Exchange will be made live soon but if you want to play around with menus download the same menu that we’ve used, its free and simple.

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