Out of all the styles that you can use for navigation, which one fits your site design best? There are many advantages and disadvantages of each type of linking styles. Throughout this article we will talk about those advantages and disadvantages of common navigational styles.

The first style of navigation we are going to discuss is text links. Text links are the simplest sort of navigation possible. These links normally contain one to two words and are filed in an array for example: Home – About Us – Contact Us. Some advantages of using text links is that they are extremely fast to load. Also using text links with a cascading style sheet allows you to apply different colors, mouse-over colors, backgrounds, and attributes such as underlines. This makes them easily changeable. Text links also can help your search engine rankings climb. Although there are fairly a lot of advantages to text links, there are a few turn offs for them. Such as the disadvantages, they are not flashy, and you cannot make them an exact size. Text links can also be shown in different fonts on different operating system such as a Linux machine and a Windows machine.

Another navigational style is graphic buttons. Although they are not as fast loading as text links, they do provide a potential eye catching appearance to visitors. The main advantage of graphic buttons is that they can flow with your page’s design to which will add to the overall image of your web site. Graphic buttons also keep a width and a height which is kept standard across all browsers if the height and width are provided in the image’s tag. Some disadvantages of graphic buttons are that they require a bit more loading time. Graphic buttons are also less descriptive then texts links, and require more labor in to creating them. They also require more bandwidth to download from the server rather then text links. Furthermore, if you use mouse over effects on the buttons that alone doubles the buttons download time from the server to the visitor’s computer, which causes some unneeded wait time. Graphic buttons are better for few links about say five at the most. If you have more then five links, I recommend you stick with text links, which in return will save you some bandwidth.

Also known to the web is yet another style of navigation which contains image map. An image map is one image which is divided in to what we call “hot spots” for the navigation. The advantages of this style include an easy set up of one image. But with this style come many disadvantages, one being they create frustration when trying to add another link to the map. To the search engines, an image map is nothing. And to users, in some cases it requires them to actually have to look in order to find the correct boundaries of the link.

Aside from the different styles of the links, we must decide how to lay them out. Having your navigation close to the header going across, will allow it to stand out to visitors. But if you put the navigation bar at the bottom of the page, it might take some time for the visitor to figure out where in the heck it is, or they may even give up. Having the navigation bar on either side left or right of the page will normally cause the visitor to have to scroll down to view all available links depending on the header size. The side navigations stick out to the users, and are fairly nice if they do not require scrolling. Basically the navigation location is up to you, but keep in mind the mentioned realities about different positioning.

Throughout this article we have discussed many important factors about linking. Keep in mind that your navigation should be in the best interest of you visitors. If they seem to have trouble finding their way around your site, you might need to re-plan your navigation.