Navigation menu design trends in modern sites

 

Designing a navigation menu that works can be one of the hardest tasks for your new website. If you have a lot of pages and information to get across, you only have a limited amount of space to do it in. Luckily, the web is huge and there are a massive number of example that you can take inspiration from. There are also a number of modern web design menu trends that you can use to influence you. As you’ll see, there isn’t a one size fits all option. What works for one site may not work for you. But this list should at least create a few sparks of inspiration that you can use when it comes to designing your sites new menu.

 

Simple navigation

There is a growing trend of companies trying to keep it simple when it comes to menu and navigation design. The idea is that customers don’t like being overwhelmed with choice and that users have now got used to clicking around several pages to find what they are looking for. What’s more, pages load so quickly now that it doesn’t take a lot of time to browse this way, either. Naturally, this probably won’t work if you’re an ecommerce store. But it should work for more simple portfolio websites.

 

Sticky navigations

These have become increasingly common to the point where you have probably seen a site with a sticky navigation recently. If you haven’t then it is a navigation bar that sticks to the top of the page when you scroll rather than disappear when you scroll down. The idea here is that it is annoying to scroll all the way up the page to go back to the navigation bar, particularly if the page is long. By always having the bar at the top, users find it much easier to move around the site. The only downside is that it can eat into precious screen real estate.

 

Sidebar navigations

These are still quite rare but they are becoming more common. Rather than have the navigation menu horizontally positioned at the top of the page, this trend sees it positioned down the left or right hand side of the page. This is more for originality than anything as it is usually far from practical.

 

Mega navigations

You will have definitely seen this navigation menu before if you’ve been on any ecommerce website. These are the menus that dropdown offering dozens of different categories and subcategories. These are a type of menu in their own right but they have become so commonplace that they need to be mentioned. These type of menus, if done correctly, are perfect for ecommerce stores because of the huge amount of products that need to be found. They can also be useful for businesses with dozens of different services.

 

If you need help creating your website’s menu, maybe our web design team can help. Get in touch to find out more.