Navigation For A larger Website

There are several options. You could have a sliding or flyout menu. But that's not ideal. Usability studies show that not everyone has the mouse control needed to make this an enjoyable way to navigate around your website. You could also employ some type of drop down, such as I have on the main left navigation of this site.

But here's a different way to organize your navigation. And it's very easy to do this with any good website template.

The basic Principle

Now all you need to do is add the horizontal navigation to your page, and have each link pointing to the relevant tier 2 page. So link A would be "Blue Widgets", link B would be "Red Widgets" etc.

Then, each of those pages will have their own left navigation menu. In the example given, I have seven links along the top, pointing to the seven sections of the website. The left navs contain six links, which are for pages related to that section only. A visitor sees only six links at a time. To display these identical pages in a standard navbar, you would have to have 42 links on the left.

More confusing, harder to find the info that you need, and I'm sure we all know that the longer a navbar is, the less visits you get to pages further down the list. One more benefit is that you will get some points from Search Engines for having all related links grouped together.

Each section can be thought of as a seperate site, almost, linked at the top, and with it's own navigation.

The homepage left navigation could contain what you consider the most valuable and relevant links, both for human and spider visitors. The beauty of this system, is that the visitor never sees every link all on one page - they only see the navigation thats relevant for the section of the site they are currently on.

So a site with several hundred (or thousand) pages is less intimidating, and it's very easy to find exactly what you are looking for. No tier 2 page is ever more than 2 clicks away from you present position (by using the top navigation) and the homepage can also be placed on there, to keep it within one click.

Of course, you can cross link the sections however you wish.

Yes, it is a little more work, setting up mutiple navigation menus. But look at it long term. What's a few hours now, if you believe your site is suitable for this sort of treatment?

Hopefully, this has given you some food for thought, as to how you can organize your navigation.I don't claim it's the best way, or the only way to handle a larger site. But it's something you may wish to consider.

And it's certainly not something that's possible using the Block Builder system, with SBI.