Along with other elements, your site navigation has to be dead-on because it has a huge impact on so many things. Also realize that we are not talking just about people on your site, but the search engines take a look at your navigation, as well. Do not ever think that people will give you a break just because you were too lazy to get your site navigation where it needs to be. What we have for you today are three excellent suggestions you can take and assess your site's navigation for possible problems.
The use of Flash on websites has greatly decreased these days since Flash isn't really that user friendly and tends to be unreadable by the search engines. If you are just in total love with Flash, then at least give people an option to sidestep it. This relates to navigation from the standpoint of clicking on a link and waiting forever for the Flash to load. The smart businesses will make their sites accessible to all visitors, and that is what this is all about. We do not feel it is worth the risk in terms of the numbers of visitors who may potentially be turned-off by the lack of an alternative.
Should you have pages that are long due to content, then go ahead and place more links at the base of each page so people can quickly click on something else. It is a very simple matter to do, and there is no real reason for not doing it in our minds. We believe this is something you must do on all of your longer pages otherwise you will be forcing people to scroll all the way up.
One of the most critical pages on all sites is the home page since it is from there that all else happens. There are also SEO reasons for placing the "HOME" link on every single page of your site. Also bear in mind that users have become conditioned to seeing that 'home' link at the top left of every page. There are a few other means to link back home such as logos, images and header graphics, etc.
Your navigation is one of the backbones of your site, and it should never be neglected in any way. Just remember to plan before building, and then make sure what you do is based on proven principles. You know how you react when you are on sites that have poor navigation, and you most likely do not stay there very long either. You know how important this is, so do not delay making sure your site is squared away, immediately.