To begin with, people use the internet because:

1. they need information
2. they want to be entertained
3. they want to buy something
4. they want to connect with others

When someone visits your site they need to be able to, in about four seconds or less, answer this question: Where am I? Where am I going to? How do I get there? How do I get back? If the user cannot answer this then, chances are, you have lost a potential customer/visitor/fan. So we make our navigation simple with terms that are easy to understand rather than vague "concepts". For example, on my site, I could call "Fine Art" "Mirrors" instead, because that is how I feel about them. That is all well and good but the visitor won’t get it right off the bat. So I want to make it easy – I call it Fine Art. By using more obtuse concepts in the navigation we are subjecting ourselves to the imagination of the visitor. We need to be able to step outside of our own point of view and look at our site from the eyes of a potential visitor. If you had never seen this site before, does that navigation bar actually make any sense?

This leads us to another challenge. Once we’ve determined that we at least have some fairly straightforward terms to work with, in regards to our page titles, we decide how to lay them out. Some people opt for as minimal as possible – in fact, they decide to lose the words all together and rely instead on symbols or, worse yet, all the same symbol. This symbol-speak might work well on the freeway with merging signs, etc. but as website navigation – with symbols that seem rather arbitrary to others but have meaning to you – this sort of navigation attempt ends up being vague and doesn’t help to immediately answer the visitor’s question – how do i get to where i want to go? This is known as a mystery meat navigation set-up because you never know what you are going to get. Symbols and/or vague titles that don’t directly point to where the visitor wants to go will lead to confusion and life is confusing enough without adding more confusion to the pile.

Creating a functional navigation area can be a challenge if you want to do something different. There are a lot of great navigation techniques but most of them rely on some standard functions – navigation bars and drop down menus. This is the de facto navigation technique not just of the internet but the whole computer world. I look at the top of my Mac desktop and there it is: a navigation menu – for TextEdit it is File/Edit/Format/Window/Help – very straightforward! Easy to use! If your site is straight-forward and easy to use then the message that it tells your potential customer/visitor/fan is that, chances are, YOU WILL BE TOO!

So, the challenge is that you want to stand out and be different but sometimes it’s difficult to do that without alienating your visitors. One way to stand out is, rally, to be straight-forward and easy to use. The web is filled with complicated jumbles of websites and then there are some that tell us exactly what we want to know – EASILY. The main component, however, that will make you stand out – that will bring people back time and again and the thing that people sometimes forget – is the CONTENT. Content is everything. Walk through a grocery store – lots of flashy packaging, little content. Lots of names for things that don’t seem to equate to the actual quality of the product inside. More often than not, in any Vons or Ralphs or whatever, the actual product inside is empty of actual nourishment. So a lot of fancy graphics do not mean a lot of great content. And a difficult to decipher navigation structure won’t make it easy for your visitor to access your content.

So, if you are the type who is looking for discerning visitors – ie, people who want something meaty – then you need to:

• Make your site easy to navigate
• Make the site easy on the eyes
• Provide regularly updated quality content
• Provide a readily accessed source of other related content.

Ultimately, this means some compromising on your loftier concepts around "naming things" and having flashy layouts and being pretty down to earth with the basic structure and formatting.

So you have a website and a content management system and don’t have a clue about HTML (hypertext mark-up language). Knowing a bit of HTML will help you style your pages a little nicer. I have created, for clients, a fairly basic HTML text styling guide. it doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts of more complex styling – like how your site got to look the way it does right now anyhow but it will let you look at the source code (by clicking that little button in the editor that says "Source") and know what you are looking at.

Click Here for Basic HTML Style Guide