Navigation Study: A look at 72 popular websites
By CleverSage | February 5, 2008
A while back I wrote a post on some of the most popular places on where to put your site’s navigation. After writing that post, curiosity got me thinking how the big players on the web designed their pages.
After collecting and compiling the information from 72 (just a random number that seemed like a good place to stop) of the most popular sites online, there are some interesting trends that surface. Presented for your enjoyment, here are the results of my observations:
An Overview
Each of the websites could fall into one of five navigation categories:
- Top
- Top Left (A top navigation bar combined with a left-side navigation)
- Top Right (A top navigation bar combined with a right-side navigation)
- Left
- Right
The results were quite interesting:
As you can see from the charts above, a top-only navigation bar was used for almost 60% of the navigation placement of these sites. Combined, a top-only and a top-left navigation made up over 80% of all sites.
Top-Only Navigation (58.33%)
The large majority of the sites that were looked at used a top-only navigation. This leads you to believe that customers are used to and familiar with this type of website navigation. Simple, straight-forward and clean.
Top-Left Navigation (23.61%)
Many of the sites that were used in this study utilized a combination of a top navigation bar paired with a left-side navigation. From my observations the top bar was used for generic links while the left-side was used to delve into deeper more focused content areas of the site.
Top-Right Navigation (8.33%)
A top-right navigation was the third most popular navigation layout. This was found on the more technology-related sites and aimed towards those that are more internet/computer savvy.
Left Navigation (6.94%)
A left-hand side navigation was used in many sites that were looking to gain consumers trusts. The sites with this navigation were about ease-of-use and stuck to accustomed navigation habits of an slightly older visitor.
Right Navigation (2.78%)
A very small percentage of these top sites did use a right-hand navigation menu. While this type of navigation is common among blogs, adoption into extremely popular sites seems to be slow at best.
Summary
After looking at all of the navigation menus used across some of the most popular sites on the internet, I have come to a somewhat mixed conclusion. Millions of dollars have been put into these websites to determine the best navigation placement for their menu.
You might say “Look, almost 60% of sites use a top-only navigation, we should do that too!” You need to examine the visitors to your site as well as the content that is on your site. Integrating a top-only navigation when you have content that needs to be displayed in a columnar format will only hurt your efforts at achieving the best visitor satisfaction and user experience and attaining your site’s ultimate goal.
Experiment, play around and test what works best for you.
Topics: Usability |