Navigation and layout

When it comes to websites it is important to have your navigation and layout perfect or you will lose customers from the get go. When a customer goes to a site one thing that is a huge put-off is a bad layout. If you do not have a well planned navigation system and a clean layout you will lose out on a lot of potential sales before they even look at your products! "Short term memory only holds around seven items plus or minus two", this is from the famous psychology paper by George Miller(1956).

Orbit Media did a blog post on Website Navigation in which they say that the number of items on your navigation bar should be kept under seven and to keep the layout simple and not piled on top of eachother.

My original layout for the menu bar was as shown below, originally I wanted to have everything structured and neat however this felt like it was too many links on the menu bar.

So after doing some research about navigation and layout i decided to follow a drop-down style navigation bar. When you would hover over "Shop" and "About Us" they present a drop down menu for you to select. as shown below.

This layout meant that I was able to have everything in my navigation bar however it also gave me the ability to include a lot of my product categories and have all of the store accessible from the drop down. whilst also keeping it tidy and organised. This is what it looks like on my site:

As you can see from the navigation layout I have kept it clean and tidy as well as not overloading either of the menu bars. Making sure that there is not too much moving of the mouse to navigate the pages.

MILLER, G. A.

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information

In-text: (Miller 1956)

Your Bibliography: Miller, G. (1956) The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. 81 - 97. Available from: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/ [Accessed 27 October 2017].

CRESTODINA, A.

Website Navigation: 7 Best Practices, Design Tips and Warnings | Orbit Media Studios

In-text: (Crestodina 2017)

Your Bibliography: Crestodina, A. (2017) Website Navigation: 7 Best Practices, Design Tips and Warnings | Orbit Media Studios. [Online] Available from: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/website-navigation/ [Accessed 27 October 2017].