Breadcrumbs are mainly a kind of secondary navigation scheme that discloses the location of the user’s in a website or web application. Breadcrumbs are mainly observed in the web page design that have high amount of content which is organized in the manner of hierarchy. These are also seen in the web page design that has more than one step wherein they perform like that of the progress bar.
If explained in a simple manner breadcrumb are text links that are arranged in the horizontal manner separated by the sign of “greater than”. This sign is the one that denotes the level of that page is relation to the page links besides it.
Types of breadcrumbs that can be used for web page design
There are basically three types of breadcrumbs for web design location based breadcrumb, attribute based breadcrumbs and path based breadcrumbs.
Location based breadcrumbs are the ones that are utilized for navigation schemes that comprises of many levels. These breadcrumbs when used in the web page design help the users to locate where they are in the hierarchy of the website.
When attribute based breadcrumbs are utilized in web page design they denote the attribute of a specific page. They basically give information those categories the existing page. For ecommerce website this is a well known mode of breadcrumb.
Path based breadcrumbs when used for the web page design helps to denote the users the steps that they have taken to reach at a specific page. These breadcrumbs are self motivated in which they show the pages the users have visited prior reaching out to the current page.
When should Breadcrumbs be utilized in the web page design?
Breadcrumbs should be utilized in the web page design of those websites that are large and also the websites that have pages arranged by hierarchy. If the website is ecommerce website breadcrumbs can be highly suitable for its web page design. Breadcrumbs should be avoided for the websites that do not have much of grouping. A very good way to suspect whether breadcrumbs is suitable for the web page design or not is by constructing a sitemap or a diagram which denotes the website navigation architecture and also after that it can be determined whether breadcrumbs would be able to improve the ability of the user’s for navigating within and between the e-commerce categories.
At the time of web page design breadcrumbs navigation must be the one that should be considered as an extra aspect and must not replace efficient basic navigation menus. This is actually an alternative way to navigate through the website.
There are many benefits of using breadcrumbs in web site design; some of them are convenient for users, do not usually dominate screen space, reduces bounce rate, reduces clicks or actions to return to high level of pages and many more. Therefore it is very essential that you know whether breadcrumbs in web page design would be effective for you or not.