If you find that most of the lower level pages of your site feature in multiple categories, you may want to skip the breadcrumb navigtaion. Though there is text link navigation in the footer section, there’s no navigation menu in the body of the pages, making it hard to navigate to other sections of the website.If you arrive on a video page directly – say, for example, through a Google search result – the only navigation option you may have is the breadcrumb trail. Breadcrumbs may provide links to additional pages and information of which the user is also interested in without making them start from square one.The most common and instinctual placement for breadcrumbs is within the top of a page.

Here are several best practices when using breadcrumbs on your website.

Make it clear where they are, how to get somewhere else, and how to return to where they came from.Steve Krug’s book “Don’t make me think” is standard reading for any usability designer and recommended reading for anyone interested in good design and best practice.The information in the book is very accessible regardless of technical knowledge. Accessing this kind of a breadcrumb navigation does not necessarily take you back on the path you came from within the site navigation.For instance, cars.com uses the attribute breadcrumb navigation that tells the attribute of each page in the breadcrumb trail.You can try choosing a path from the homepage and you will see that at a certain point the breadcrumb trail changes to attributes of each page rather than displaying the location from where you started.Attribute navigation could include keywords to gain on page SEO benefits, but since it does not go show you your location on the website in order to trace back on your browsing path, it may cause usability issues.Another drawback with attribute breadcrumb is a certain page can appear both in an attribute breadcrumb navigation or in a category-based navigation, thus creating duplicate content. This will give you a good idea for organizing your breadcrumb navigation within your site.

This type of breadcrumb navigation is sometimes seen on e-commerce sites.The path breadcrumb navigation tells you the path taken to reach a certain page. Remember them? For … For instance, there is no need to add a ‘You are here’ before your breadcrumb navigation. This allows users to find the breadcrumbs in an uncomplicated manner and make use of them accordingly.If you do decide to use breadcrumbs, make sure that you use them across your entire website. If you choose to use breadcrumbs, do so with the addition of a page heading as well.Breadcrumbs are only to be used as support to the primary navigation, never to replace the primary navigation altogether. As it has almost no drawbacks, it seems like it is a very easy decision to make for a website that is considering to incorporate breadcrumb navigation. Check out our resources for adapting to these times.

For example, for path-based breadcrumbs in which the links do not necessarily have a hierarchical relationship to each other, using a “greater than” symbol may not convey their relationship accurately.A good rule of thumb to follow when sizing your breadcrumb trail is that it Now that we’ve discussed the who, what, when, where, why and hows of breadcrumb trails, we should take a look at some live examples.

In their simplest form, breadcrumbs are horizontally arranged text links separated by the “greater than” symbol (>); the symbol indicates the level of that page relative to the page links beside it.In this article, we’ll explore the use of breadcrumbs on websites and discuss some best practices for applying breadcrumb trails to your own website.Breadcrumb navigation should be regarded as an extra feature and shouldn’t replace effective primary navigation menus. Some Following is the example which shows a fly-out menu from a breadcrumb element of ‘About Us’ rather than a primary menu that also contains an ‘About Us’.Some sites place unnecessary elements, that either describes the breadcrumb navigation or adds an extra functionality to the breadcrumb navigation. Please wash your hands and practise social distancing.