All You Need To Know about Breadcrumbs in Web Designs
Published on 24 February 17
Paul0
Estimated Read Time: 03 minutes
Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a term derived from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale in which the protagonists create a trail of breadcrumbs so that they can track back home. Similarly, your website visitors also need to know their location in the hierarchical structure of your site. Breadcrumb, being a secondary navigation system, shows them their location on your site or web app. It serves as an effective visual aid providing contextual information to users such as their location in relation to the design hierarchy of the entire site. Furthermore, it communicates the content value of your site and thus reduces overall site bounce rate by encouraging browsing.
It is a very compact design element which hardly takes any space in your web page but essentially reduces the number of actions your visitors need to take in order to navigate through your website. However, make sure that your web development specialist does not use it for single level website without any logical hierarchy.
Classification of breadcrumbs
There are three types of breadcrumbs classified based on their location, path and attribute:
1. Location based breadcrumb that is basically the representation of your site structure which enables your website visitors to traverse through your site that has multiple levels. It is very useful to visitors who have entered the deeper level of your site from an external link such as search engines.
2. Path based breadcrumb also known as history trail shows visitors their entire path they have taken to reach a particular web page. Usually they are generated dynamically and at times it could be very confusing.
3. Attribute based breadcrumb offers an entirely different aspect by listing the categories to the specific page or product and thus it is popularly used for ecommerce website.
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Best practices for breadcrumb navigation
The following are guidelines that a professional website development agency abides by while designing a breadcrumb navigation to create an exceptional user experience:
- Depending on the aesthetics of your website you can use separators such as greater than symbol, arrow, quotation marks, slashes for separating links in breadcrumb trails.
- It should not be too eye-catching to distract visitors from the main content or primary navigation.
- Proper size and padding must be selected to provide enough gaps between breadcrumb levels so that your site visitors can easily use them.
- Remember not to use breadcrumbs for mobile sites rather think of ways to make your site less complex so that breadcrumbs are not in your agenda.
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