Navigating Navigation: Linking outside your site

Whew, information architecture is not as easy as you might think! Just build a site map and call it a day, right? Well, I think a lot of people do just that when starting out designing or redesigning a site, but I think we’re getting into trouble. What’s on my mind today is something kind of goofy; what is it exactly that we’re navigating in our navigation?

Maybe it’s because I’m seeing this more and more in the websites within my domain. I don’t work on them all but my team and I do work on quite a few. The disturbing trend that I’m noticing is the tendency to link from the navigation to an outside (or inside within the domain) website. Personally, I don’t think this is a good idea.

I have to say “personally” because I’m not finding a lot of research to back up my feeling about this, so I’m just going to put it out there as common sense and see what happens! When I create a sitemap of a website, I’m creating the navigational pages of that site, right? Otherwise I’d be creating a navigation of the entire World Wide Web and honestly, I don’t want to do that. I don’t think it’s my job as a UX designer to put every link you might need on the subject in the navigation. If you need some outside links, I need to create a little page for you called, I don’t know, resources or something. Then list some nice links.

I’ve always had trouble with links that take people off the website I just created. I think most clients, if they stopped to think about it, might feel the same way. If you’ve come to my site looking for information, I should probably be the one to give it to you.
So, all that to say, I believe it is a good practice of website usability to link your navigation to your own pages.

Do you agree?
Yeah, I thought you would!