Left or Top Navigation

Hello,

I am creating an E-commerce site focused towards women, and i was wondering which type of navigation is better in terms of ease of use for the user.

Well, it totally depends on your needs and requirements, you must go through the websites that are made by some very good Ecommerce web designing companies so that you can get a clear idea about the Ecommerce web development...

Hello
The importance of an effective navigation
An effective navigation allows visitors to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Designing an effective navigation can also help to direct visitors to other offerings on your site. It is also necessary that the search engine robots can read the navigational links in order to spider (or index) your site.

Creating an effective navigation
Site navigation can be of various types depending on the type of site. For example, a news site will provide navigation to the latest news (current or maybe a few days old) on the cover pages. Because of the sheer amount of pages of news articles, it is impossible to link to each item that appeared in its lifespan. On the other side, a smaller site will probably be able to link every item from its cover page (homepage).

The goal of an effective navigation is guided by the 3 click rule (all pages on the website can be reached within 3 clicks from the homepage). This rule applies to search engines also, where pages more than 3 clicks away are not indexed.

1. Categorize content, products or services: Create smaller categories for organizing the content, products or services. The categorization may be logical, alphabetical or as applicable. The categories can be arranged in a tree structure with several subcategories. Hence it can be several levels deep. Create a navigation panel specific to each category and place it in the left or top panels so that the user can view all links within that category without scrolling. This navigation panel will change when the user moves from one category to another.
2. Centralize navigation menu: Centralize the navigation menu on a separate navigation file. Using server side include code, add that navigation file to each page that belongs to the category. This will reduce maintenance worries if the navigation
   menu is changed or updated. Only one navigation file has to be updated instead of each of the web pages.
3. Provide link to home page: Provide a link to the home page from each page so that the user can return to the main page if lost. This can be achieved by creating a 'Home' link. In addition, add a link to the home page on the logo image.
4. Use breadcrumb trail: A breadcrumb trail provides a quick way for the user to know what section or branch this web page is in. A breadcrumb is useful if the website has a lot of categories and each category is few levels deep. A good example will be a directory such as Yahoo or DMOZ.

I like top navigation. Some people say left is better because you don't have to go back above the fold if you are reading something to get somewhere else on the site. However, now you can create top navigation that moves down with the page. Maybe look into that

Left navigation is what i will suggest it to you as it of great help as Search engine spiders crawl the website from the left.

I depends on the template but I prefer top navigation.

Left or top makes no difference to a spider since both navigation elements will be seen before the main content.

For users I usually plump for left side navigation. Usually because as my site expands I can add more links vertically whereas with top navigation, you soon run out of space.

Hello friends


I am creating an E-commerce site focused towards women, and i was wondering which type of navigation is better in terms of ease of use for the user.

Thanks for all friends

hi, I would recommend a left side navigation for the categories and top navigation used for other general pages (home, about, terms, delivery etc). Using the left side navigation i would also recommend creating an expanding element to display sub categories rather than some javascript based system.

I think vertical navigation is the best thing that you do for this purpose. It will not divert the attention of the viewers. Furthermore, it is the trend of the new era that you can not overlook at any cost.