It should be goal driven and help people find what they are looking for. It should also get people to where you want them to be. Lets have a look at some things you could do yo structure your navigation to make it goal driven and user friendly.
Evaluating Website Navigation
It's always good to improve on something and it's very simple to improve on anything if you make the time to take one step backward to go a couple of steps forward. This is why a good way to evaluate a website and make good user friendly improvements is by placing yourself in the users shoes with your hand on the mouse and thereafter acting brain dead. The better alternative would be to get a friend with no knowledge about website design to evaluate your site. This allows you to judge your website in a new perspective and help you make decisions on introducing new usability strategies.
Navigation Structure and Naming Conventions
Notice that navigation naming conventions should be to the point, if your navigation links to a "Premium Service for Our Clients" page, it should be as simple as naming the link "Premium Services". The idea about any navigation should be aimed at telling the user where they'll be taken when clicking on the link, this applies to everything on a site. Sounds simple doesn't it? But there's more, let's say your promoting a new software and your aim is to get people to download this software, while calling the link "Download" will be affective and tells people they'll be downloading something, you should consider that it would be far more affective calling the link "Download Product-X", this is because the naming is now seen as more trusted by telling people EXACTLY what they will be downloading.
Above is a simple example on how buttons/navigation should be named to guide the user to where he/she would want to go.
Navigation An Online Road Map
You want to let people know where they're going before they get there. Think of it as a road map with well marked road names and that clearly indicates where the driver should turn to get tot their final destination. So doing, when first viewing a link, a user should know and have a good idea where that link will be taking them and have a good idea about the information that will be given when clicking on the link.
Naming conventions on any navigation can make or break user experience.
A Navigation In Order
Imagine an army with no ranking system, orders would be given but no one would know who's orders are the most important, because no one could tell who has a higher rank. This is the same as structuring navigation, navigation should be ordered from most important to least important, a hierarchy of importance. As a standard your home page will be the most important and from there on the importance of the pages follow in rank. Navigation can also be step oriented, by arranging them in order of step by step relevance, first step being the highest ranking.
Making Navigation Easy On The Eye
Another important factor is whether to use uppercase or lowercase on Navigation elements: lowercase has a greater impact when it comes to reading and usability in general, it allows for easy reading because of the shapes lowercase characters have.
The Pros and Cons About Styling Your Navigation
With the advance of CSS web design, it's become clear that almost anything is possible when it comes to styling navigation these days. One of the advantages of CSS is that it allows the implementation of text on background images. Although background images in HTML have been around for some time, CSS has become more advanced by allowing hover, focus and a number of other states, the best link practice on navigation is by using HTML text links alongside CSS styling. This is much more affective then relying on image links, it's also good SEO practice and will be less time consuming when it comes to updating or adding links. (More about SEO implementation can be read here: 5 Simple Ways to Increase you Ranking on Google).
Here you can see how the use of CSS and HTML text links can be used to make your navigation more easy on the eye without having to use image links.
Drop-Down Menus in Navigation
There aren't many advantages by surprising people with the surprise drop-down navigation menu, you might as well call the drop down link "Congratulations, you found more links". By not letting people know that there is a drop-down on a link in your navigation, they might think you're being misleading. It's also a bad idea to be hiding important navigation elements which might be useful to the user. There are some changes you can introduce to make people aware of drop-downs in your navigation: by placing a down arrow next to the navigation text, this way you'll make people aware that there's more links inside the section.
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