Breadcrumbs - Top Tip for Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is actually one of those rare IT terms which makes a bit of sense. The terms makes you think of a trail which leads you somewhere. Exactly right. It shows where in the website hierarchy the currently viewed page is located. Here are a couple of good examples:

Using this form of navigation process, not only does it tell you where you are and how you got there, but it also provides user friendly shortcuts to other sections of the website.

For e-commerce sites, breadcrumbs are really useful during the checkout process to give shoppers a bird's eye view of where they are and how far they have to go in the order process.

Using breadcrumbs can also improve your search engine ranking because they use contextual text links - google loves those. But beware - multiple clickpaths can lead to pagerank dilution (if there are many different breadcrumb trails to the same loaf of bread). To minimise page duplication for the search engines, you can append the parameter containing the breadcrumb trail to the end of the URL using javascript. Ok, quite honestly I don't know how you do that but perhaps that's a good subject for tomorrows blog.

In short - breadcrumbs are a great navigation tool particularly for complex websites. They are both user friendly and google friendly so they definitely get my vote.