Anatomy of a Menu Types

How you structure your WEBSITE NAVIGATION

How you structure your website navigation depends on your target audience, and what format you think would be most intuitive and accessible to them.

Menu Types:

Horizontal Navigation Bar

The horizontal navigation bar is the most common type of navigation menu. It lists the major pages side-by-side and is placed in the website header.

Dropdown Navigation Menu

List the most important or general items in the top-level navigation bar and include the rest in a dropdown menu.

Hamburger Navigation Menu

Most often seen in mobile web design. With this approach, the navigation items are often listed horizontally on larger screen sizes and collapse behind a hamburger button on smaller screen sizes.

Vertical Sidebar Navigation Menu

The items are stacked on top of each other and positioned in the sidebar.

Footer menu

It’s considered good practice to include links in the footer menu to the most important pages on the site.