Effective navigation

Effective navigation, or moving around within a Web site, application, or game, is…essential for findability, and successful interactions.…Only the smallest Web sites and applications consist of a single page or screen.…The vast majority have much more content and functionality, spread across many pages.…People move among pages or screens three main ways: the navigational system, the…search system, and through contextual links in the body of the page.…All three of these must work together, and they all rely on having an effective…organizational system.…

The most common way to represent the structure of a Web site is through a sitemap,…sometimes also called the site architecture.…This diagram shows how pages are organized in the overall hierarchical…structure of the site.…Although there are many ways to get to pages in a Web site, the sitemap only…illustrates the navigational paths among the pages.…Sitemaps do not show all of the possible links among all pages, because it would…become a very complex, and probably illegible, diagram if we tried to show that.…