Improve Web-site Navigation

Design Elements To Improve Web-site Navigation

Menu bars, either horizontally or vertically, are the most common factors of allowing users to move through your site. Your visitors need to easily be able to navigate around your site; if not they might get frustrated and leave. Also when your website is easy to navigate around visitors are more likely to return to finish reading certain articles that they were interested in, but didn't have time to read. Search engines also look at how easy your website is to navigate when they send their spiders in to crawl your site. A more easily navigable site could help your search engine ranking, which we are trying to get.

What is website navigation?

Basically it is how visitors are able to get from one page to another in your website. All of your pages should be linked together clearly and easily for your visitors, you never want to confuse your visitors. The website blueprint of your site should give you a good starting point for interlinking your websites pages.

Provide a sense of scale. Making the web site’s hierarchy visible through drop-down menus under the home page’s main headings on the home page is a good way to give the user a sense of a site. If one of the primary headings on a home page were “Tools,” the drop-down menu would list “Hammers,” “Saws,” and so on. With larger sites, it’s always a good idea to provide a search box to avoid frustrating users.

Make it intuitive. visitors to a web site should be able to find what they need in no more than three clicks, and proceed to the first step in less than eight seconds. In order to achieve this ideal, the direction on each page should be clear and consistent.

To start, consider that upon entering a brick-and-mortar store, most people first search for a sign indicating the section they are seeking, such as Housewares. Once in the Housewares section, it makes sense to look for signs that point to particular products, such as lamps or rugs. A web site should have a similar intuitive layout.

Show the steps of progression. If you want your customers to complete a process, try giving them a clear picture of how far they’ve come. If they can clearly see that they only have one more step to go, they may be more likely to finish. Across the top of the page, the first step in the progression might read “Your Information,” which is where customers enter a billing and shipping address. The next step might be “Payment Method,” followed by “Review Your Order,” then “Submit” to complete the purchase. Make sure throughout the entire process, the customer can see not only every step going forward, but the current step and the step or steps that lie ahead.

Give the user flexibility. If a user goes down any path on the web site, make it easy for them to back out. This can be accomplished easily by keeping a global navigation on every page. The step navigation described above also should assist users with backtracking if necessary.

Keep the customer on track. Remove extraneous navigation once a customer is in the final steps of what want you’d want them to accomplish. The primary goal of any business site is conversion, which may mean getting the customer to contact you, make a purchase or register for a special offer. Therefore, a web site should have has obvious conversion paths, i.e., make it easy for the visitor to contact you, place an order or get to the registration form. Also, navigation should integrate call-to-action conversion accelerators.

While you’re at it, check out some of the websites created by our custom website designers.