Websites are considered one of the most important e-marketing tools. In this era, marketing for universities is becoming vitally important. Thus, universities are interested in their websites. This research is concerning with improving these websites design as an e-marketing communication tool, by giving attention to the navigation design as one of the web design elements and as a major factor in usability as a mean of quality.
This study aims to answer the following questions to redesign/design a website: Is it important to give attention to design a usable navigation website? What are the considered factors to evaluate a usable navigation(UN) website as an improving step of the design? What is the essential approach to achieve to it? All of that will make new challenges to the designer. Therefore, this research followed a descriptive study to answer these questions and provide the designer with evaluation checklist factors of UN of the website and a common approach to design/redesign it.
This research applied this evaluation on Benha University (BU) as a case study (it's one of Egyptian government universities). This evaluation showed the weakness of attention toward this aspect of BU website design. Thus, this research suggested a new usable web navigation system for BU based on strong Information Architecture(IA) as an essential approach by means of Exploring Data and Affinity Diagramming methods as common IA methods for navigation websites design. It suggested a wireframe model based on coherent IA structure that should lead to good design.
This research wishes to contribute to the improvement of marketing Egyptian higher education through improving website design by highlighting the importance of design UN in website as one of the important elements, and design a feature that precede visual design phase directly.It also wishes that the designer will use a style of evaluation and the suggested UN system as a starting point for design/redesign good Egyptian universities websites.