With every new year comes new web navigation trends that can contribute a fair share in increasing footfall on your website. While participating in the race of making their website aligned to the latest web practices, many designers and UX experts often undermine the importance of navigation in their web projects.
Website navigation, more or less, serves as a map that helps your website visitors reveal different areas and important corners of your website. The visitors would love to spend time on your website when its navigation is clear and smooth. Discussed below are some of the emerging web navigation trends that are going to stay in 2017.
1. Fixed Scrolling Navigation Bars
Being disappeared for a few years, the fixed navigation bars have now got their way back as a prevailing trend in a few exceedingly beautiful websites on the World Wide Web. These benignly fixed navigation bars are known for providing user-friendliness, irrespective of where the visitor may be in the middle of a web page. Besides, these fixed bars offer great user experience when the website is visited on the mobile devices. The users don’t need to swipe back to the header in order to explore more sections on a website. You can check some examples of fixed position navigation here.
Video Source:www.usmagazine.com/
Navigation Bars: A Yes Or A No?
For websites that comprise of a plethora of navigation items, fixed bars are a great option. This will increase the total page views and glue up the users on the website for long. Fixed scrolling bars are definitely a yes.
2. Mega Menus
Mega what? Navigating large websites are such a big nuisance for your users. Using mega menus can make a difference!
Often used on large or magazine style websites, mega menus offer more options and links to the users as compared to the drop down menus. The designers and website architects should be very careful when designing the mega menus because they allow users to dig deeper into a website using a few clicks. They can also overwhelm the visitors by showing a plethora of page links. Moreover, these menus do not work so well on mobile websites because the small mobile screens are not much spacious to accommodate them.
Image Source:www. amazon.com
Mega Menus: A Yes Or A No?
Mega menus can help you provide more content so that your visitors can directly skim to their desired section of the website. I am not a big fan of mega menus. I usually use the keyboard navigation and it is really difficult for me to browse different sections of the website using the mega-menu. For me, mega menus are a big no, unless you are creating a retail website.
3. Vertical Sliding Navigation
Vertical stacks are a great way to be a cut above from all those websites with “standard” navigation style. Vertical navigation is more fun and interesting. It offers your users a new perspective to think about your website. This trend is mostly used on portfolios or digital agency websites.
Image Source:www.yokedesign.com
Vertical Sliding Navigation: A Yes Or A No?
If you want to have a full-screen design that gives you a refreshing look, or you are looking for something different from those traditional, old-school layouts. Then vertical navigation is the way to go. You need to make sure if you can work on a vertical navigation as it is quite difficult to create them from the scratch. Besides, they can also give you a hard time when used on a responsive website.
4. Button-Free Navigation
Extremely subtle and pleasing to the eyes, using simple “Text” as the buttons is a new thing in navigation. Who needs a framed button, when you have a series of appropriately spaced text that’s so pleasing to the eyes. It gives a simple and user-friendly navigation style.
Tips to use button free navigation
Try to use a simple and legible font. Choose the colors carefully, and make sure the font is visible. You can use a light and dark combo for utmost visibility. Add plenty of space between the texts to increase the readability. More space will also be convenient for users while clicking/tapping on the button text.
Image Source:www.livingedge.com
Button-Free Navigation: A Yes Or A No?
If you are creating a website with fewer buttons and minimal design elements, button free navigation is a thumbs up for you.
5. Featured News Carousels
This style of navigation has become a must have for magazines, blogging and news websites. On websites where dozens of news stories and articles have been published on a daily basis. Using a simple carousel navigation at the header of the page can allow the visitors to get a sneak peak at all the featured or latest stories. The content updater can curate or update the articles dynamically.
Image Source:www.mashable.com
Featured News Carousels: A Yes Or A No?
This style can bring a drastic increment to the website traffic and user-friendliness. So, it may be ideal if you’re designing a news website or a blog that will have a great volume of content. The web visitors can discover multiple stories at a time. This will upsurge the average time that visitors spend on the site.
Final Thoughts:
The best thing about technology is that it evolves with every single passing second and all the fields— that are affected by it— evolves simultaneously. Same goes to the web design field; trends come and go every year. All you need to do is to stay updated, as it is really beneficial to keep tabs on what is going on in the market.
Make sure that whatever trend you choose for your website must compliment your website purpose and content. Always try to live up to your user expectations and deliver personalized experiences, and come up with your own trends.
If you know any other web navigation trends that the design field has been experiencing right now in this very year, do write them out here. You can also write your views if you agree with us.