Core Web Solutions Articles

There are few things worse than a poorly designed navigation system for a website. Even with the simplest of websites, the importance of the navigation can be seriously underestimated. Remember, with any website, it is very easy for your visitor to leave in one click, so frustrating them with poorly designed navigation is to be avoided at all costs.

Some basic concepts for good website navigation

Build a consistent navigation system throughout the web site. Ideally a website menu consists of links to the homepage, “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Site Map” and other most important pages of the web site. For larger sites a well thought-out dropdown menu may be required.

Create a sitemap. This is a page where the structure of a website is displayed in a clear manner. It also helps search engine locate all the pages of your site. Large web sites may have hundreds or even thousands of pages. A sitemap may be done at the beginning of the website project to help plan the structure of the site and then used as a guide available online for visitors and search engines to use.

Use in-page or in-text links to drive visitors to the next page you want them to see; keeping in mind that you should have a “goal” for the visitor to achieve. This could be driving them to the contact page to complete a form or make a phone call to your office. If you are selling something online that requires payment, the goal would be to get them to the checkout and pay for the product. Your navigation should smoothly and cleanly work with this idea of driving the visitor, without being overly pushy about it.

Always have an easy way back home. As well as you may plan your navigation system, someone will get lost or bored. Always make an easy option to get back to the home page. A clear top-menu “home” button will do. Linking the logo in the top banner to the home page is also a modern convention. Just remember to make it real easy.

Other considerations

A good navigation system can help the ranking of your website prominently on search engines. There is a lot more to it than just that, but making sure that all the pages of the website are somehow linked via “hyperlink” so that search engine indexer bots can follow them is key.

Don’t try to have too much on the home page or any page. If you have a complex website of several hundred pages, trying to have drop down menus to accommodate all of those pages is too much for anyone to handle and they will get lost.

Having an internal search engine will work best with complex sites. Your most important pages should be clearly in the main navigation, but what about the other hundred or more pages? Search! Using a good search engine program (not public search engines like Google), will help visitors find what they are looking for with ease, rather than searching manually through drop-down menus.

The bottom line is that website navigation is extremely important to do right. Don’t overlook the importance and consider hiring an expert who does this for a living. It will save you time and headaches of a poorly performing website.