We all know the fairy tale of Hansel & Gretel in which the siblings leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind them as they look for the way back home. While it didn’t exactly work out for the siblings in the story, this strategy is used in computing today. Breadcrumb navigation is a real term, based on the German fairytale.
What is Breadcrumb Navigation?
Just like in the story, breadcrumb navigation is a path that leads back home (to the homepage). It is an easy way to keep track of your path from a certain starting point and is displayed at the top of the page. Each step provides a link that can navigate back to the page you were at before.
Let’s look at an example. If you are on a service page on a website and the path to that page went from the homepage to the second menu, to the fifth menu, the breadcrumbs would look like this:
Home > [Menu 2] > [Menu Item 5]
These breadcrumbs serve as links so by clicking Menu 2, you would be taken back to that page, allowing you to browse there again.
More Than Just Websites
This is also used when it comes to the toolbars of files and folders on your system. This makes it easier to navigate your files and go within different folders.Â
The entire point of breadcrumb navigation is to make navigation and organization easier for the user. For more tips and tricks, come back to MyTek’s blog every week!