Website-Navigation at its Best - Responsive Design revolutionizes Navigation!
A well-structured and -designed navigation is the most important requirement for the usability of a website. It leads the user to relevant areas and indicates its locations. With the marching in of responsive web design now, many new navigation patterns are possible and thus solve old principles and standards for design development.
A navigation concept for a website should always be coherent and designed uniform across the individual pages. This not only facilitates navigation for visitors, but also pays off on SEO due to a better indexing. As a designer, you should pay attention to intelligible menu items. Use of navigation should be simple and intuitive. Therefore, for example, a user generally understands that in case she or he´d click on the logo of the company, one is re-directed to the starting page.
With the invention of mobile and responsive web design designers now face new challenges in terms of design. The classic case is the "toggled navigation". She is the navigation most used on mobile websites. It is the most often used navigation bar at the top of the site. Here a bar is positioned at the top of the site. This is equipped with a button element, which can extend the navigation when operating. Bootstrap is well suited for this, because the framework comes up with such a navigation solution.
Multi Toggle" is perfect for complex navigation structures. This solution so to say is a collection of nested accordions. Once the user taps on the main navigation, the sub-categories open up. With this approach in a small website area, many navigational elements can get accumulated. The "Mega Dropdown" works the same way as the Toggled Navigation. The difference here is that in addition to text links one can also integrate icons, pictures or a combination out of both. "Slide Navigation" is the infinite design pattern. Here categories are split on several levels and browsed through additional controls or swipes.
Whether classic Toggled Navigation or chic and sophisticated Slide Navigation - the designers are offered a variety of options. Responsive web design softens the boundaries between mobile and desktop.
