Navigation is a very important part of any website. It is true that most of the users visit your site through search engines instead of the homepage. To conveniently move between the various pages within a site, a good navigation design is required. Due to the lack of space on the top and sides of web pages, it has become very difficult to design good navigations. But always remember that it is very vital.

Few principles of creating effective navigation are:

* Don't Be Too Original
There is no need to be very innovative while creation of navigations. For example, a page which tells you about the organization whose site you are visiting must be labeled as 'About us'. If you try to be innovative and name it something like 'Philosophy', it will only lead to confusion among the visitors.

* Clicking the Logo Always Goes Home
Always make sure that whenever a visitor clicks on the logo, they go straight to the website's home page. An example of a really bad design is that when a visitor clicks on the logo, a pop-up window opens and describe the logo. It is very obvious that the user would not have clicked on the logo to know  about the logo. People always treat the logo as a link to the home page.

* Always Include Search
It is very important to include a search box on your site because most of the visitors are not patient enough to search through the menus to find what they are looking for. Simply make an input box in which the visitors can type their query along with a button labeled as 'Search' next to it.
Also a press of the enter key after typing should take them to the results page.

* Highlight on Hover
It is also advisable that the navigation button gets highlighted when the user hovers over it so that they know what they have selected. The users should know what their click is going to do. This is essentially important if the navigation system has more than one level. Both the sub-menu and the item should be highlighted so that the user remember what he has selected.

* Use Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs tell the user the path from where the users started. This is very important as the site's pages are deeply nested in the hierarchy of the navigation.

An example of Breadcrumb is:

Designing > Articles > Navigation > The Principles of Effective Navigation

A click on these links would take the user to the category's index which would contain sub-categories.