The Benefits of Simple Navigation
Let’s talk for a minute about simple navigation…
When you are thinking about your website, you will need to start thinking about the look and presentation of your website. But you must also start thinking about those who will be visiting your website, and you must always remember that some of your current or future clients may not be very web savvy. Therefore you always must think about easy and simple navigation for your clients and customers, and your website must be easy for them to navigate around. If it isn’t, there is a good change they will get frustrated and leave your website for good, and not take a second look at it.
Difficult navigation potentially will loose you customers, clients, and traffic!
You may know how to get around your site, and you may know exactly under what category other subcategories sit, however you must put yourself in the shoes of someone who has never seen your website before. Think about when you go to a site for the first time, and you just may be looking for something in particular. Have you ever gone to a website where you have to use the search just to find something? This is exactly what you do not want to have happen.
Whether you are creating the website yourself, or if you sit down with your webmaster, talk about the menu and navigation. Make solid navigation aside from the usual home and contact us buttons. For example, if you have a fairly large site with content for about us, bios, and mission, all three of these areas can go under “About”. You can create these sub-pages a couple of different ways, think about if you would either want a drop down navigation menu, or if you would want the user to click on about, and then have a sub menu on the side. If you have a very large site with many sub-pages I would suggest that you have the user click on the ‘about’ page, and then they would be able to see the list of sub-pages. However, if you have a smaller website with not too many sub-pages, I would suggest a drop down. Do not use a drop down if you have more then 5 or 6 sub pages, if the drop down is too long it may overwhelm the user, and it will not look professional.
Your final navigation should be user friendly, and simple. Before you site goes live, make sure you do a test run. Have someone go through your site, someone that has never seen it before, and ask them to search your site for specific items. If they have trouble finding anything, you need to take a second look at your website navigation.
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