It’s nearly impossible to make a modern website without first building a site map that serves as the basis for the navigational menu. In order to achieve the most user-friendly interface for an audience, a web designer first needs to understand the site’s purpose.  Here are four navigational models that can help match purpose to navigation.
Designing for the Shortest Path
Most websites are designed on the theory that visitors know where they want to go, and would prefer to get there in the fewest number of clicks possible. The best way to accomplish this is to construct a hierarchy for …

MB/I central has become a lively place over the past couple of months. By concentrating representatives from sales, administration, design, programming, and management in one location, Marissa has given us the chance to brainstorm, integrate efforts, and share broad design philosophies even as we work on specific projects.

My own focus, whether testing a new CMS or adding content to an existing site, tends to be on the ease and usability of our systems. The easier it is to find or change information, the more I tend to like a site. …

Online store category pages are crucial in helping the visitor:

• focus on the items he is interested in
• choose what he wants to learn about next
• guide the visitor one step closer to making a buying decision

We are so used to category pages that we take them for granted… until they are not there. They act like filters, grouping items in ways that make sense to us. They show a list of items with something in common, basic information about the items, and ways to sort the list itself (by price, color, size, etc.).

Category pages answer the following questions:

• Did I choose the right …
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You launched your site, got some traffic, and maybe even some business. But is your site all that it can be? There are several good analytics solutions (like Google Analytics) that give you all of the information you may ever want about who is visiting your website, what other sites those visitors are coming from, which pages are browsed the most, and even which pages visitors leave from.

You basically get the “what”, but you don’t get the “why”.

• Why do visitors leave the site without clicking on any of the navigation links?
• Why do visitors add items to their carts but don’t …
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