Designing Your E-Commerce Site for Service

Navigation

''Human computer interface'' scientists will often define ''navigation'' as a form of prompted, directed search. A visitor navigating around your site is searching a space of information and functions, looking for something. It''s the job of your navigation design to assist visitors in finding what you want them to find.

The most scalable and flexible way to organize your navigation is the two-level, ''site index'' and ''subindex'' metaphor. This involves:

a simple, clear top-level index - often placed across the top of the page.

a context-specific subindex, showing you links relevant to your current position.

Frames are generally a really bad idea. Avoid them if at all possible - lots of people simply hate them, and they really mess with people who want to reload single frames, bookmark single frames, and move backwards or forwards through a series of pages or forms.

Robots are bits of software on search engines which crawl over your site looking for content to index. You should do everything to help robots find stuff in your site - ''flattening'' your structure and having nongraphical links as well as the fancy ones.

Entry Points to your site may not be as you expect - people will often come in straight from a search engine, or a long-forgotten bookmark. Make sure they can ''get back out'' of the place they are when they arrive.

Searching should, if possible, lead to similar navigation metaphors as normal navigation. This will allow the visitor to conduct her own navigation without learning new metaphors.