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When designing a site navigation system it is wise to consider the following

• It is a human interface you are designing, so make it very obvious what to do!
• Spiders and Bots will also be visiting so make things nice for them also.
• Maintenance, it you will need to update it then make it flexable.
• Not all traffic will come in the front door.

The first consideration is how you have structured your site. Dont make the links to deep, deep means serialy linked pages,one after the other. If your site is such that you need to bury down then you should leave a bread crumb trail or you should provide a sitemap. Both of these methods will help human and search engins navigate your site.

If a visitor arrives at your site from a search engine or link they may not be arriving through the home page. In this case they will not be able to find your home page if you have not linked it! Remember that the BACK button on their browser will not take them off site!

In some cases if you have a page that you have linked to from several places e.g. pageA pageB and page C all link to pageDon your site. It may be undesireable to have 3 return links so you can have a javascript link that will tell the browser to return to the last page (browser history -1)