If you’re a web designer like me, I’m sure many things might be bothering you time and now. A key concern of today’s website designers is the placement of navigation bars. These designing professionals are confused as to whether they should include navigation bars on web pages or avoid them as a whole. Keeping this concern in mind, I’ve written this blog which makes you familiar with three strong reasons that support the cause of dumping navigation bars within website pages. I’m not telling you to get rid of menus all together, but choosing to hide some of them could be something that’ll take off your website to a brand new level of success.
Navigation Bars- How important are they for a website?
Well, the birth of navigation bars took place right along with that of the World Wide Web. Designers across the globe believe that including navigation bars within web pages offers a clear route to visitors who aren’t aware about everything that’s available on a website. Today, a lot of web designs are worked upon, keeping the navigation bar placement in mind. Although, it’s hard to argue about the effectiveness of navigation bars, I believe there are good reasons of avoiding them in your web design. As an ardent web designer, I feel sticky navigation bars are better skipped than embraced. If you still aren’t sure about the entire idea of omitting the navigation bar, here’re three solid reasons that will force you to give a second thought.
Reason No.1- Lesser distractions
Nowadays, a majority of web designers are into the habit of storing all the junky and cluttered web content within the navigation bars. Whether it’s a mobile number, fax number, search box, drop-down menu etc. navigation bars have become a hub for storing everything that can’t otherwise fit on the website. What’s the point of having such navigation panels that tend to make your website look distorted and un-professional?
With a clear and crisp web page containing just the required number or links/content, you can grow your chances of gathering maximum audience. Unwanted links and content on your website will always turn-off your visitors and they may choose to move to a new website, leaving you puzzled about the whole situation.
Reason No.2- Smooth transfer of information
Unlike the web design wherein special emphasis is being put on stuffing web pages with navigation bars, the one that is deficient in menus makes information transfer smoother. Eliminating the usage of navigation bars strengthens the relationship between the brand and its customer. Rather than just making your visitors navigate from one page to another, you can simply try out doing something new in HTML and CSS3 to create features that will make your site more inviting. Every business owner wants to establish a communication bridge between his/her brand and the customers. If you’re able to convey your business message to your customers, you’ve probably won the battle of winning high-paying leads. After getting a complete insight on the kind of products and services delivered by your business organization, the website visitors can be easily compelled for maintaining a long-lasting working relationship with you.
Reason No.3- Greater Customer Focus
( Image Credit: shutterstock )
Removing navigation bars from your web pages can actually lead to greater customer focus. Now, you’ll ask me how? Well, the answer to this question is by simply having minimal links/hyperlinks on your web pages, the visitors would be able to focus more on the actual functionality of the website. Being weary of over-designing is probably one of the major reasons behind the low rate of customer focus. In order to gain maximum benefits from your website, it’s better to pay attention to the customer audience and not the mere visitor count. You need to ensure that all the visitors reaching your website are able to gain something from your site and not merely find it to be boring and un-important.
Conclusion
As a conclusion to my post, I’d like you to know that there are many websites which have neglected the usage of navigation bars and believe me, these sites have fared really well. If you too eliminate the usage of navigation bars within your web pages, you’ll probably land up in making your site more appealing for the end users. Removing a bar doesn’t have a very large impact and you can opt for the same, without the need for worrying about the performance degradation of your website.
Have you ever built a website without a traditional navigation bar? If yes, do let me know your experiences in the comments box below.
Author bio – Mike is a blogger by mood and web designer by profession. He gives ideas on HTML to wordpress theme conversion and loves to share his thoughts on social media. Log in to his web to get other Photoshop to wordpress theme conversion services.
Reason Number 1 is to avoid distractions?
Total thumbs down on this article. I was hoping for real reasons, not whimsical subjective fluff.