Website menus are a crucial part of any website because the first appearance of any website is the menu. They not only inform people of what you have on your website but they also help in determining your website’s ranking. Good knowledge of ranking helps in enhancing site traffic and helps you in getting a better ROI. The way you curate your website menus and label the different items determines how much usable your website will be to the end-users. Being descriptive can be helpful but you should avoid format based navigation and drop-down menus. You should be intuitive and can consider using structured navigation like main and sub-navigation. Through Tihalt Technologies, you get an attractive and professional menu for your business website.
In this article, we will take a sneak-peek into the different types of website menus.
1. Standard Horizontal Menu
This is the most common design that is followed by most of the websites. Here you can get a horizontal list of the main pages and users can navigate easily. This indicates a low bounce rate and higher conversions. Hence if you are looking for higher website traffic then this may be the ideal design that you should aim to get.
2. Sidebar Static Navigation
In this category, the links are effectively displayed all-important links. The user can utilize the right side for scrolling down and the left side of getting a bird’s view of everything. Thus this provides an effective solution to the users where he can have everything at his fingertips.
3. Hamburger Menu
This menu is rather pragmatic and creates a sleek view of your website menus. This is highly famous for users due to its dynamic and subtle nature. This was initially created by the Xerox product designer and it gained huge popularity in some time.
4. Multi-media Based Menu
Here you can incorporate a lot of multimedia to improve the functionalities. This menu helps in making your website more users friendly.
5. Mega Menu
This menu offers a drop-down interface to the users. This option facilitates the user in seeing everything on one page. This provides a mobile view to the users and hence has gained huge popularity with many companies. However, you must avoid using too many items in your navigation. You must aim to limit your navigation to a maximum of five items.
6. Vertical Sidebar Navigation
This is another popular category that is mostly utilized by real estate companies.
7. Sticky Fixed Menus
This is commonly referred to as the persistent navigation bars. Here the menus do not disappear when the user scrolls through the website. This type is utilized when the highlighting points are generally mentioned in the horizontal bars.
8. Streamlined Navbar
This is a trendy way of showing the main links to the project. This category was in high demand last year.
9. Slide-out Menu
This concept was inspired by mobile UIs. Here the menu can slide from the left side, right side, top or bottom. The user generally admires the visual effects of the text or icons.
10. Footer Navigation
This is quite similar to the static navigation bar and the menu appears on the bottom of the page which sometimes creates a menu for the users.
11. Interactive Navigation
This category is in high demand and helps in maximizing revenues. The dynamic features grab quick attention controls a lot of eyeballs and help in increasing the website traffic. However, one drawback of this is that this is not fully compatible with all the browsers and devices.
For curating an interesting navigation menu you can take the help of any of the website design company in Bangalore. However, before deciding the menu you must settle on something that will be best suited for you. You should design the website menus in such a manner so that the navigation highlights your products and services. In such cases, your site will communicate instantly with end-users and you can notice higher conversions. You should also pay more attention to which items appear at the top or bottom of this list. This is commonly referred to as the ‘serial position’ some studies show that the serial position influences the attention level of the users to a considerable extent. Ideally, you must put the most important item at the beginning of the navigation and the least important items should be kept in the middle. The contacts should appear as the last item on the list.
