Navigation Bars: Definition of a navigation bar
Navigation bars, also known as nav bars, navigation menus, or nav menu, are a graphical object consisting of a series of web buttons that usually extend along the top or side of a Web page and include text, images, background color, and/or animations. Displayed as buttons that link to other sections or pages in the site, all the web buttons within a navigation bar usually look similar, but are labeled differently.
Navigation Bars: Purpose of navigation bars
Navigation bars are called “navigation” bars for a very good reason. The sole purpose of navigation bars is to give your website visitor an easy way to navigate between the main sections of your website. Navigation bars should be clear and concise, so as to add value to your website’s visitor by giving them a clear guide to all the information your website has. By giving web visitors a menu of choices to choose from, websites have trained visitors in a sense to click on a navigation menu when they are looking for additional information contained on that site. A navigation bar is your site’s map (but is not a sitemap – more on that later).
Simply put, you need to have a navigation bar on your website. Your visitors want more information, and the navigation bar is the best way right now to point them towards more information, in an organized manner.
Navigation Bars give your visitors:
- An easy way to access the contents of your web site
- A way to navigate through multiple pages in your web site
- A convenient alternative to a browser’s “Back” and “Forward” buttons
Navigation Bars: If you do not have navigation bars on your web page…
- How are visitors to your site supposed to navigate it efficiently?
- Will visitors to your site have a pleasurable experience?
- Will whatever product or service you are selling on your website be received well (will it sell) if it cannot be found on your site? Think of this as entering a physical brick-and-mortar store, and not having any of the aisles labeled. Not good for business, is it?
Navigation Bars: Difficult to create
Navigation bars can be slightly tricky to create if you do not have previous experience when it comes to creating graphics. One way to create a navigation bar is to simply create a few web buttons that look alike and then insert them into your web page, one by one. This is a horrible solution, as the buttons may not line up properly, giving an amateurish look to your site. The other rather obvious problem is that if you do not know how to create even one web button, how are you supposed to create a cluster of web buttons to make a navigation bar?
Navigation Bars: Items to consider before creating navigation bars:
Not all sites are created equal, nor do all sites attract the same types of visitors. To decide what type of navigation bar would work best for your site, consider:
- How many nested levels of information will your site have?
- What type of Internet access will your visitors have?
- How graphically intense would you like to make your site?
Text navigation links are sometimes very efficient for a website, depending on the nature of the site. However, most webmasters, or non-artist web designers decide to include graphical navigation bars for their sites. This is where Easy Web Graphics helps tremendously.
Navigation Bars: Create navigation bars with ease: – a solution:
Easy Web Graphics is software that was specifically designed to help non-artists create professional quality navigation bars (and other web graphics for your site) without having to worry about technical industry terms or techniques. In other words, with this software if you need to create navigation bars without a big hassle, this software will make it happen. It’s been described as a “quick and dirty” method for graphics creation.
Easy web graphics helps you create navigation bars:
- Of any shape
- Of any size
- With any font
- With any color
- Filled with any image or picture
- …in short, easily!
Easy Web Graphics outputs navigation bars as one complete image to avoid forcing you to create many separate web buttons that may not line up properly in your HTML. Simply map each button on the navigation bar to a separate URL and your navigation bar serves its purpose in a very simple manner.
