Designing navigation menu

A web page menu gives the viewers an easy navigation links to the other pages of a website. Not only that, - it also gives an idea to the viewers that what materials they can expect from that website. A good menu system is one which serves those basic purposes very well. Here I have few suggestions about how to design a good menu for your website.

1. Use standard font size and link color such that the viewers not get confused about those links. Do not use any image link or image caption. Images not only increase your page size also they are unreadable when viewers of different languages converting your page to their mother languages.
2. Place menu block at a convenient position of your WebPages (say left sidebar) such that viewers can easily see it without scrolling their browser window.
3. Use well defined anchor text preferably the title of the destination page such that viewers can easily understand that which type of material is expected from that destination page.
4. If your website dealing with different topics then do not mix up the links of different topics. Try to divide them categorically; use proper caption at the top of each category. It will help your viewers in surfing your site.
5. Try to avoid dynamic menu: A dynamic menu is one which uses JavaScript to produce dynamic effect on your menu system. Examples of such menu are dropdown menu, windows explorer type tree menu, etc. the disadvantages of dynamic menu are,
   • JavaScript works on client computer. And different browsers handle JavaScript differently. So it is really difficult to design a universal menu script which will work on all browsers irrespective their version. Also different user setting makes thing further complicated. A menu script which works fine on Firefox browser may not work on IE properly.
   • Use of JavaScript increases the size of your web page.
   The only advantage of dynamic menu is that you can accommodate larger number of links in shorter place.

Simple HTML menu is the safest solution. It works uniformly irrespective to the browsers and their version, and under any user settings.