I’m currently working on an eCommerce website for selling designer and ready made wedding cards and wanted to share about making the navigation as appealing as possible, so here goes:

Horizontal navigation systems are limited to a maximum of five navigation points or words. Studies have shown that the eye and brain cannot capture words horizontally as quickly and easily as when they are stacked in a list. Limiting the amount of menu options will help to reduce this weakness. Keep in mind that the width of your layout will reach its limit earlier than the height, however, even with vertical navigation structures we should try to limit our menu options to a maximum of seven points or words.

The site I’m working on has about 5 points and a horizontal navigation, which, in this scenario, works best as we have a rotating product slider followed by product thumbnails. The intent is to not invite users to a same level containing both menu and product slider.

Navigation is an important part of the content flow for web page elements, understanding it and the others: headers, titles, images, thumbs and so forth (more on this in upcoming posts) is important in creating and displaying a seamless flow of information hierarchy.