Web copy and website design must be integrated to produce a website capable of attaining optimal results for business. To ensure smooth website functionality, writers and designers must work in tandem and share an understanding of 4 vital areas:

• The purpose of the website
• The website’s target audience
• Brand/product characteristics
• Web requirements and constraints

The Purpose of the Website
A business website always has a purpose. No enterprise or individual will put up a website just for fun, or because they want to. Business websites are the need of the moment, to further business and scale profits. As a website designer, the most important question you can ask your client is what his website’s objective/purpose is.
An e-commerce website is a business website, as is a company profile website, or a personal portfolio website. All of these are seeking clientele for their products/services; and basically just looking for ways to make money on the web.
However, although the end goal is the same for all business websites, different businesses have different requirements and focus areas to support their end goals. This is where a number of online business owners falter as they are not sure what their website’s require. As a designer, you can help your client establish his website’s objective, which might primarily entail to:

• Lead generation
• Online product marketing/selling
• Creating brand awareness
• Inviting subscriptions
• Community establishment
• Feedback generation

Clear definition of a website’s objective helps form a ‘call to action’ to enlist user participation. A compelling web copy further helps by urging users to take that action and contribute to the website’s click-through and conversion rates.

The Website’s Target Audience
Business websites will ideally target a niche audience, typically a primary focus group who will help conversion, and one or two secondary groups who will help click-throughs. A good website design is one that works on a wide range of users, irrespective of their personal needs and biases.
Without a target audience, a website loses its aim. But a target bank is not enough; without a focused and integrated design and copy, web businesses will clearly miss their mark.
By asking your client a few questions about his niche and the consumer markets he is targeting, it is possible to come up with design and content that will communicate his business across to people.
Case in point: web designers and copywriters must work together to produce successful websites. One cannot exist without the other; designs without copy serve no purpose, and copies without designs are positively unattractive.

Brand/Product Characteristics
A website’s design and content, both need to reflect a brand’s characteristics the best they can. A business brand that advertises wacky and risqué is no good with content that speaks of safety and professionalism. Similarly, for a brand that is clean and direct, a lyrical writing is ineffective.
Brand personality must be presented across with precision and clarity. Brands signify what a business or company stands for. Designs and content must merge to set forth expectations with clarity.

Web Requirements and Constraints
Disjoined information and website architecture destroys user experience. A content writer without SEO knowledge or knowledge of web strategies, site navigation and basic rules of online selling can hurt usability and conversions of a site. Web designers without smart design solutions and strategies to incorporate web copies can affect the overall success of a website.
Although most copywriters today are educated in online methods of marketing and selling, and designers structure sites to bank on keyword-rich content, both must cooperate to attain website usability. Strict adherence to web requirements and constraints help tremendously.

In Conclusion…
For as long as the web will exist, web designers and web copywriters will continue to fight each other over who is more important to a website’s success. Truth is, working in tandem and unified attack can save the day. Unfortunately, designers and writers are far from making truce, if not completely misunderstanding the importance of it.
However, in the best interest of business success, an understanding must be reached between both parties. Thankfully, this is not difficult to achieve if some basic rules can be employed:

• Treating the client’s marketing documentation as guide and reference for design and write-up.
• In the absence of documentation, asking the client for information required for goal-based design and content.
• Withdrawing from the project where client fails to define his website’s purpose or marketing strategy. There is no point wasting time providing trial and error solutions to the client.

Most importantly, never rule out the need for clear communication between designers and writers to create robust websites.

Your website is complete and ready to be launched. But before you make it live, stop and think: are you forgetting a few necessary checks in your eagerness? Here’s a list of 15 things to check before making your website public:

1. Titles and Meta Tags – Page title is not only important for SEO, but it tells the user what a page is about. Page titles should ideally change with each different page and must relate to that page’s content.
   Although meta keywords and meta description tags have little importance in SEO for major search engines, they should still be included. Meta descriptions must be different on each different page and relate to that page’s content. Meta descriptions are important because search engines often display the description in search results.
2. Proofread Content – Check your content one more time before launching your site. Get someone to read it, preferably someone who doesn’t yet know about your product. There will always be something to pick up on from his/her feedback. Revise content and see if you can make modifications, reduce, break, or add text to make your idea more comprehendible to first-time users.
   Check dynamic texts on your website too.
3. Check Functionality – Test your site thoroughly before making it live. Do your contact forms, subscriptions forms, shopping carts, search functions, member log-ins and registration areas, etc, work correctly?
4. Graceful Degradation – Check if your site works with JavaScript turned off, because personal computers often have JavaScript disabled for security reasons. Also test any AJAX features on your site.
5. Links – Search engines hate broken links, and users find them frustrating. Don’t just assume all your links will work because they are in place. Check them before you make your website live. The last think you’d want is for users to click on a call to action link and be redirected to a 404 error.
   Make your links prominent to users by using link colors that stand out against your page’s background. Make sure you code a different color for visited links; you don’t want users clicking on the same links repeatedly. Also, avoid underlining text that is not a link.
6. Defensive Design – A 404 page will be displayed if your users request a page that does not exist. By providing a 404 page that directs the users to your home page or suggests another page, you are stopping users from exiting your site.
   When you are validating your forms, check by submitting information that is unusual like letters in number fields and vice versa, lots of characters, etc. If there is an error on submission, error messages should help users fix incorrect entry.
7. Sitemap – Don’t forget to add the sitemap.xml file to your root directory before website launch. Sitemap.xml points major search engine crawlers to pages of your website, thus helping search engines easily index your site. Your sitemap.xml should be uploaded to a location in your root directory so it appears as www.abc.com/sitemap.xml.
   If you are using WordPress, install Google XML Sitemaps plug-in to automatically update your sitemap whenever you post new write-ups. Uploading your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools tells Google you have a sitemap.
8. Validation – Neither users nor search engines care much for validation because web pages will still be displayed perfectly without validating codes. However, it’s still a good idea to validate your pages. They not only help debug your codes but also improve the overall quality of your work.
9. Analytics – An analytics tools help measure statistics to determine how successfully your site is performing and converting. Google Analytics is a favorite among web owners. Other analytics tools like StatCounter, Kissmetrics and Clicky can also be used.
10. RSS Link – If your website has a newsreel or blog, make sure you have an RSS feed for users to subscribe to. Conventionally, a RSS feed icon in the browser’s address bar works, although sidebars work too. To include the RSS feed in your address bar, include this code between heads:
    <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Site or RSS title” href=”link-to-feed” />
11. Cross-Browser Compatibility – Always check your website on popular browsers like I.E 6, 7, and 8, Chrome, Opera, Safari 3 and Firefox 3 to ensure your website design shows up correctly.
    Most web designers you know are trying to combat cross-browser incompatibility and their designs from appearing dislodged across browsers. But cross-browser incompatibility is a disease of the web that isn’t going to get cured anytime soon. Therefore, while your design does not have to be pixel perfect across all browsers, it should at least show up correctly on all browsers.
12. Optimize – Optimization is a process that multiplies in practice after you have launched your website. However, by ensuring you have employed the basic rules of SEO to your site, you have helped it foray in the right direction.
    Make sure your page titles, headers, keyword-rich content, image alts and CSS styles are in place so you can build up on them, along with other SEO practices after your site has been launched.
13. Back-up – A back-up strategy is crucial, especially if your website runs on database. For a WordPress website, make sure you have installed a WordPress database Backup.
14. Print-Style Sheet – Create a print-specific style sheet so that if users want to print your page’s main content, they are able to directly print from your web page without having to copy and paste main content into a text document to avoid navigation and design elements. Use the following code between heads:
    <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print” />
15. Fevicon – A Favicon brands the window or tab your website opens in, in a user’s browser. This branding icon is also saved as bookmark when you favorite a web page for quick future access. Some Favicons will be saved in the root directory as favicon.ico depending on your browser. To ensure your website’s Favicon is picked up all the time, use the following code in your head tag:
    <link rel=”icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico” />

A website design doesn’t always have to follow conventions, but assumptions about what your audience wants and how they will behave on your site, can land you in deep mess. People who are visiting a particular website are nearly always looking for some specific information or activity. You can avoid fluff or complications on your website by simply staying out of a user’s way and letting him access your site the way he wants.

Some Imperatives for Your Site

• An internal site search using Google or Yahoo custom search is great for your site, especially a WordPress site. Custom search is pretty easy to install, so there’s no reason you would want to avoid it. Besides, if you have more than one site targeting different services, a custom search will serve as a good referral tool to your other sites without losing your customers.
• Contact Us and About Us are two pages that are very important to your business website. An About Us page may include details like location, date of establishment of business/company, core services, etc. Information of the kind gives your visitors comprehensive knowledge of your business and business style. A Contact Us page shows your business is authentic and that you invite user interaction.
• A simple and intuitive navigation makes easy for your customers to use your site. Your site probably targets a niche, but there is absolutely no way you can guess what exact information your users will come looking for. Of course, you will try to provide as much information as possible, but 100% user satisfaction can never be achieved.

The best you can do is covering as many options as possible. If you have a site on landscape gardening, make sure information you provide will help beginners, intermediates and professionals, alike. A thorough market research is usually the best way to determine what your users want and what you must include in your site.

With several new tools in the market, observing your audience’s behavior on your site isn’t difficult.

• Heatmaps – CrazyEgg is one tool that allows you to see the most clicked areas of your site. Simultaneously, you get to know which areas visitors have clicked less, or not clicked. There is another tool, Clicktale, which you can use to watch videos of visitor conduct on your site.
  Both these tools allow you to understand why some areas of your site are active, while others are not, and this insight can help you make improvements in your website.
• Analytics Report – If you have a Google Analytics, it’s easy for you to track visitor behavior on your website. Create separate segments for loyal visitors and goals in Analytics.
  A loyal visitor dashboard will help you learn everything you want to know about those people: where they are coming from (search engines and demographics). A goals dashboard will show you how your visitors have responded to up-sells, their largest lifetime value, etc.
• Use Your Common Sense – At most times, web users will scour the web looking for specific information. If they come to your site, it means they believe your site has what they are looking for.

Your job as a web designer is to ensure your users find what they are seeking in the fastest possible time, and with little effort. Do not create a fluff distraction that will hinder this process. Advertisements distract users, unless you are creating relevant ads.

The website design and development process is wrought with distractions, primarily because web designers are undecided between aesthetics and usability. Web designers will usually build a new website, or modify/improve an existing one, caught somewhere between satisfying clients and creating a site that generates measurable results. Do quality of websites suffer in the process? It does, because where usability and user experience is concerned, web designers often create websites that are focused more on enhancing the attractiveness of design than user-friendliness.
Know Your Audience
Building a user-focused website requires an understanding of the target audience and their knowledge of the web. Example: A site on gardening and a site on web programming services will be vastly different in look, people they target, and navigational features they include.
A gardening website targets the general population of men and women who may or may not be tech savvy. Hence, the site’s design has to be simple and uncomplicated to appeal to its users. However, a web-programming site that mostly targets a technically sound group of people may include a navigation structure that is comparatively elaborate.
The general design of your website can be created/modified once you have a clear idea of who your target audience is. Some of the specific aspects of your website’s design that will need special attention are:

1. Navigation – A clear, logical structure is imperative to usability. Without a simple, organized navigation, moving through the website becomes difficult. If visitors cannot easily find what they are searching for on your site, they will simple leave.
2. Communication – Is it difficult to determine the purpose of your site despite looking through several pages? Does your site clearly communicate its niche to its first-time audience? Headlines, images, taglines, colors, and design styles – all of these tell your audience what your site is about. An effective website is one that consistently communicates your trade throughout the website. 
3. Design Style – Always focus on a website design that your target audience will find appealing. Factors like the right color-scheme, font styles, and layout is important. You will rarely have a rock band site with simplistic design, soft colors and italics fonts, or a lingerie site with a grungy layout and hard, metal colors and Gothic fonts. 
4. Content – Content has a strong impact on visitors. Because web users are primarily always searching for highly specific information, a poorly written, uninformative content will have a negative impact on users. If you know your target audience, be sure to dish out information your visitors are going to find useful, and easy to understand. 
5. Readability – What use is good information if your users cannot read it? Ensure you use the right font sizes and styles for your content. Also note, dark prints on light backgrounds are easier to read than light prints on dark backgrounds. And since most first-time users will only glance through your page instead of reading every sentence, remember to use bold texts, headings and sub-headings, and short paragraphs and bullet points to improve readability. 
6. Advertisements – These can be extremely annoying, and while they may be legitimate, a user-focused website should not include flashy and intrusive ads, pop-ups/pop-unders, etc. Not only do such interferences irritate, but they also destroy user experience. 
7. Customer Priority – A customer will always know when you are selling-hard and when you genuinely believe a product will help him. Although, understandably, the primary aim of your business is to make money, when you have a user-focused website, your business priorities should be secondary. Rather than designing a website around your product/services, create a website that is user-friendly and useful to your niche audience. Sales will happen naturally. 
8. Contact Page – When a site is especially useful to its users, a good number of visitors will try to contact the webmaster, either to compliment or leave a constructive feedback. Without a way to communicate easily, it can be extremely frustrating for the user. Besides, making yourself unreachable to your users shows you do not care for interaction, which doesn’t scale too well with people. 
9. Accessibility – Your site must be 100% accessible to your users. A Flash-based site or a site with a lot of video/audio snippets is guaranteed to load slow and eat bandwidth. In most cases, web users will go looking for other fast loading sites instead of waiting for your content to load. You wouldn’t want that. 
10. Customer Issues – Always have a non-tech friend/colleague/family member use your site once you have finished designing it. If they can use it with ease, you can rest assured, most web users will too. Any suggestions, feedback or difficulty in use can be implemented and dealt with to better user experience. 

I don’t know how many of you have seen the ’98 Hollywood drama ‘Pleasantville’, but if you have, you’d know what I am talking about.
Color is beautiful. Color adds life and vibrancy to even the most ordinary of objects, patterns, and designs. Colors generate imagery, scent and even taste, and they express a myriad of emotions. To appreciate the beauty of color, you don’t have to be an artist, or in our present context, a graphic or web designer.
Everybody knows color, and appreciates it. It’s not for nothing that color is one of the prime elements of a website design, because color as we see it, can express an alarming number of ideas and draw a large number of reactions.
Colors play an important role in how they represent businesses online. Colors portray an idea and though different colors mean different things to different cultures, web users have come to accept a few typical colors that are used in web advertising. Here are few examples of how colors and businesses are stereotyped:

1. Blues, especially the cobalt, navy and ice blue shades are typically associated with corporate sites, as is gray, black and white. Very rarely will you see a corporate site in green, red, yellow, or orange, unless they are websites advertising graphic design services, pet products, cosmetics, clothes, etc.
2. Pastel shades like baby/candy pink, lime yellow, baby/sea blue, citrus/sea green, and lilac/lavender are usually used on sites whose main target audience is women. Baby product sites will also use pastel shades.
3. Bright blues, usually cobalt to near navy shades, maroons, bottle greens, and black will be used on sites that target men.
4. Earth colors and shades of brown, green, orange and yellow will find takers in eco sites.
5. Grays, browns, whites and blues will be used in non-profit sites, religious sites, registration sites, survey sites, and basically sites which want to project a sense of seriousness and business.
6. Travel sites will typically use greens, browns and yellows for seaside destinations, blues and whites for ice or hill resorts, and greens and browns for forest locales.

Do Colors Affect User Decision?
They do! 60% of purchase decision is made based on the color of the business website. Because color is one of the primary elements of a website’s design, the use of color will determine a site’s appeal. Also note, because users have come to expect color stereotypes, it is often difficult for them to accept anything different. Example: A baby site in black and pink is unexpected. A blue and pink combination will elicit a better response, every time.
Note that color palettes rarely differ among similar industries. Travel will always use combinations of blue, green, and yellow. Experimenting with shades could do the job of distinction, but you will also need superior content, products, site structure, navigation, etc, to make sure your site converts. Basically, your aim should be to draw a balance between colors that are expected and general design that stands out.

Website designing is not just about knowing how to make a design. It requires a professional blend of creativity and practice. To hone one’s ability to an impressive technical level and improve skills, a designer must learn new and advanced designing techniques. Although most designers strive to create designs that exhibit their distinct individuality, most often they find themselves looking at existing websites for inspiration. In this article, we have discussed brief guidelines that can help you experiment and create designs with out-of-the-box ideas. So, don your best creative cap and add more innovation and uniqueness to your website design by following these ideas:

1. Start clean and fresh
If you want your design to stand out from others, the first rule is to make your design unique and interesting. Make sure that you do not copy design ideas from other websites or bank on unused or recycled designs to save time and effort. Always remember that it is the originality of a design that beats all other factors. Hence, start clean and fresh and you will be surprised to discover how your creative touch can make a website design effective, and successful.

2. Think Different
When designing a website, designers find it difficult to break away from popular designing trends. However, if you wish to create an above-mediocre design, breaking free of the trends is imperative. Challenge your creative skills anew, try thinking differently and come up with original ideas to make your work a success.

3. Creativity over CMS
If you want your creativity to speak more, say no to Content Management Systems. Modern day designers widely use various CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Expression Engine to make work faster and easier. Handy and flexible to use, CMS has made it big in the web market, but as a design professional, know that a content management system ultimately hinders a designer’s creativity.

4. Say ‘No’ to Free Website Layouts
When you take up orders for client’s website designing, always remember that they will want something different and innovative from you. Hence, looking up web design galleries to get ‘inspired’ is not a wise option. When you start working on a project with someone else’s ideas in mind, it will invariably affect your creative skills.

However, clients who are not very sure of what they want for their website’s design may provide designers with links to other websites as sample resources. In such cases, refer to sample websites by all means, but make sure to add a bit of your self in the design to provide a quality design solution.

5. Blend of old and new
When designing a website, don’t just depend on a particular set of rules and techniques. Instead, mix and match the old trends with new ones to create a bouquet of something new, attractive and effective.

In every sphere of life, we differentiate elements broadly under two categories as ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ in accordance to their value and quality. If you want to have your website stand tall amidst the crowd and make your presence felt far and wide, it’s important that you make your design ‘DIFFERENT’. But to think up of newer and innovative ideas that are ‘out of the box’ is definitely a challenging task that every professional website designer has to face.

While innovation and quality makes the foremost needs in website designing, there’s another thing, i.e. details, which needs to be dealt with equal importance to make a ordinary website look ‘extraordinary’. Take a pause and think for yourself: Why some companies get tagged as ‘brand’ when there are lots of textile companies that make similar clothes. Why opt for an expensive luxury car, when majority of cars offer similar features? This is where excellence and detailing help carve the curve of difference between ordinary and extraordinary. An eye for detail not only helps add to the value of a product but also makes an effective difference that is capable of reaping profitable rewards.

In web industry also, the principle of ‘detail’ holds true as it helps improve the value of a website design. In this blog, we have discussed about some details in website designing that need to be considered with more importance to enjoy a more successful impact.

1. Add Value to your Design: To help your design make a satisfying impact on its viewers, it is important that you stay updated and in sync with the changing trends of designing. Put in your best efforts and improve your skills to a more professional level so that it works beyond the boundaries of artistry. Invest time in perception and usability details that help add value to a website.

2. Take a Close Look: When designing, always maintain a close monitored look to ensure an error free detailing. Zoom in on your design and dig in the background to check out for subtle detail mistakes that can affect the designing as a whole.

3. Navigation: Not just in designing, proper detailing needs to be maintained in site navigation too. It not only adds to the readability and accessibility of the site but also improves the related site actions.

4. Pixel Difference: As a professional, you need to maintain an eye on the pixel detail to ensure a better visual layout that catches a viewer’s fancy instantly. Make use of single pixel lines to create a distinctive visual output that is contrasting and easily noticeable.

5. Shadow Game: When designing a website, it’s a common practice among professionals to apply ‘drop shadow’ to its logo or header that helps to highlight and improve its essence better. To make the design exciting, interesting and powerful enough to grab viewer’s attention, designers mostly use subtle shadow effects to make the design more catchy and appealing.

With the popularity of new technologies such as smart phones and tablets making it big among modern day users, the trends of online interaction has gone for a massive redefining in the last couple of months. While big and established organizations can afford to change their web presence with the changing trends of web industry, it becomes tough for small businesses as they have a tight budget to maintain. Here we have talked about some of the aesthetic design trends that a small business organization can bank on to stay connected with the changing world:

• Avoid Flash: Flash rules the roost when it comes to designing a website that needs to be interactive and dynamic. But if your company is a small one that has to abide by a tight budget, avoid using flash animation and videos. Instead opt for HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 that makes more sense.
• Web Fonts: In website designing, typography makes a crucial need that adds to the beauty and effectiveness of a website. Hence, ensure that you use a good customized web font that conveys the company’s message and values to its targeted audience rightly and successfully.
• Mobile Compatibility: Since the release of smart phones, mobile surfing has made it big in today’s world. ‘Staying connected’ being the mantra of today, every company, big or small, should bank on this new trend to reach out to maximum number of users at the fastest. Make your website design compatible with mobile version to enjoy maximum benefits.
• Social Media: If you want to stay in touch with your potential customers, an active social presence is the solution to try out. Being the latest trend of interaction and communication, social media also helps in creating a brand presence that attracts more traffic to a site.
• Add Touches of Future: As a small business company, you may not be able to afford all the cutting edge trends of website designing. But it is suggested that you try to employ some touches of future such as CSS3 or HTML5 in your website to enjoy the best benefits of technological developments.

When it comes to designing an effective website that helps boost a company’s web presence globally, no doubt a professional designer is always favored. But while most designers are aware about the tricks and tips to do so that a design rise above the crowd of mediocrity, not many are informed about the things to exclude to save a website design from being tagged as ‘annoying’.

Designers, especially new ones, are in love with their ideas. But as a professional you should maintain not to overdo it in one way or another. Here in this article we will be discussing about some of the things that you should stay away from as a professional designer when designing a website:

1. Huge Flash Intro Screen: The main objective of designing a website is to attract visitors. Hence make it a point that you do not make your visitors wait for long. Using huge flash intros can slow down your website, thus driving away potential customers.

2. Background Music: Adding music to your website background is an absolute no-no unless you are designing for a radio station or a music company. It has been observed that most of online visitors do not enjoy a musical background that goes on continuously on every web page.

3. Huge Font Size: It’s a myth in web designing industry that the best way to attract a visitor’s attention is to use big fonts. But it’s not true, as visitors do not like to be shouted at.

4. Small font size: Using very small fonts in the content can also drive away your visitors. Make sure that you do not make it too loud or too soft, but try to keep a normal tone that has an interactive and communicative approach.

5. Overlapping layers: Using layers can be useful upto a level but make sure that you don’t make it annoying for visitors. Forcing visitors to read through your messages is not the right way of approaching customers. If you want to attract more potential clients to a website, try persuasion instead of brute force.

6. Popup Windows: Many website designs display sudden popup windows which can be a big reason of annoyance for visitors. It not only distracts a visitor’s attention but also becomes a hindrance to the smooth navigational flow of the website. Hence try to avoid popup windows in your website design layout.

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With users of today having no time to waste; website designs that allows easy and smooth navigational facility makes for a more favored choice among visitors. To satisfy the need and requirement of clients at its best, a variety of navigational patterns are used by website designers that makes the architectural foundation of a website. Get a better understanding about the topic as we discuss about some of the popular website design navigational patterns and their respective characteristics:

Top Horizontal Bar Navigation

Considered as one of the most popular navigational menu design pattern, top horizontal bar navigation is the most frequently used in website designing. Mostly found above or below the site header of all the web pages in a website, this pattern is suited for single column website layout. The characteristics of a top horizontal bar navigation are as follows:

• Navigational items are presented in text links that are either button shaped or tabbed shaped.
• Mostly placed horizontally, this navigation pattern is found close to the logo and above the fold.

Vertical Bar/Sidebar Navigation

In this pattern type, the navigational items are arranged one above the other in a single column. Mostly found on the top left column of the primary content area, vertical bar or sidebar navigation pattern performs better in left to right usability than vice versa.

Suitable for both sub-navigation and primary navigation menus, vertical bar navigation are commonly used in multi column website design layout that contains lots of links. The characteristics of a vertical bar navigation are as follows:

• In vertical or side bar navigation, text links are widely used where as tabs are rarely opted for.
• In vertical menus, plenty of links can be added.

Tab Navigation

Tab navigation is the pattern that designers can be incorporate and style in any way according to their need. From realistic and textured tabs to glossy, rounded tabs and simple, squared-edge tabs, tab navigation opens new ways of implementation in virtually every kind of websites. The characteristics of tab navigation are as follows:

• It resembles and function similar to real world tabs such as folders, notebooks etc.
• Though frequently used horizontally, tab navigation can also be designed vertically.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is a form of secondary navigation that is mostly used to support a website’s primary routing system. With its name derived from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, the main task of this navigation pattern is to help a visitor find his way back home. The characteristics of this breadcrumb navigation are as follows:

• Breadcrumb navigation is mostly formatted as a horizontal list of text links that are connected with arrows.
• Though widely used as a sub-navigational pattern, breadcrumb is never used for primary routing purpose.

Search Navigation

In the last couple of years, search navigation has made it big in the market as one of the most used routing system that is well suited for heavy content websites which are difficult to navigate otherwise. Mostly used in e commerce and blog sites, search navigation makes content easily accessible to visitors. The characteristics of search navigation pattern are as follows:

• Search navigation bars are mostly located at the top of a website layout, i.e. near the header or top of sidebar.
• This navigation pattern is also found repeated on auxiliary sections of a page layout.