Support Navigation and Wayfinding

Making it easy for people to navigate around a website or application helps everyone find what they need quickly and effectively. Clear wayfinding especially helps people with visual, mobility, or cognitive impairments who may otherwise find it difficult to understand where they are and how to get where they want to go.

When you plan and develop the framework of a website, through templates that will be reused across multiple pages and through site-wide visual design, there are a number of ways you can support easy way finding:

  • Provide consistent, reliable navigation aids on each page so that no matter how a user arrived at a page, they know where they can go from that page.
  • Support navigation through different methods, allowing for preferences for navigation.
  • Provide a clear indication of the current location within the site.

Related Techniques

✎ Technique: Visited links

In long lists of links, it's helpful to show users which links they've already followed so they can focus on unseen content. Browsers do not tend to let you style visited links with anything but the color property.

✎ Technique: Site search

It's important the search facility on your site is logically and conventionally placed and constructed for optimal accessibility.

✎ Technique: Site and page navigation

It's important to provide consistent navigation regions to navigate between a site's pages and—where there is a lot content on each page—between sections of pages.

✎ Technique: Positioned navigation bar

When positioning elements using CSS, it's possible to place them in a position that does not reflect their location in the source order. This can have unexpected side effects for keyboard-navigation users.