This is the final installment in the ‘what makes a good website’ series, if you’ve missed the previous entries of the PLAN I’ve linked them up for you below.
Our focus this week lands on website navigation, and the importance this component plays in your site’s success and audience satisfaction.
Unfortunately navigation seems to be viewed solely as that primary strip sitting proudly above or below your header image. Wrong.
Your website is a navigation network, punctuated with content who’s purpose is to support and promote the existing navigation.
You want your audience to navigate around your site, to explore, get comfortable, be impressed, and find you worthy of visiting time and time again.
You produce content to support them in taking that action.
Post an image and it automatically attaches the default image location link…which you should be changing to something far more useful by the way, and assigning alt tags too.
Your Sidebar content may contain an opt-in form, adverts or sponsorship blocks, popular or recent posts, resource pages, social media icons etc..etc… All navigation.
Your website navigation should provide a way in, and most importantly provide a way back out. Transparently and openly.
Visitors don’t like feeling like they have no control or getting lost. It’s frustrating and will result in them kicking you to the kerb.
Your website navigation has to make sense to your users first and foremost. Then, and only then, take the search engine requirements into consideration.
Here’s some check points for review:
Tiered Menus
Multi-tiered drop down menus can be cumbersome and make your website navigation look cluttered. You don’t have to display every page on your site on every page of your site…(no that wasn’t an echo). Less is definitely more.
Let me put it to you this way. A book doesn’t give away its whole plot in the first chapter. A stripper dosen’t rip all their clothes off in the first 30 seconds. The fast or total reveal may do more to alienate than you think. Uncover only what is necessary for the action you require.
Trained Consumers
Websites for the most part follow the same general patterns in navigation placement. As a result, we as consumers have been trained to look to certain areas where we expect to find the things we’re looking for.
If you are going to create something completely different with your website navigation rules, make sure that difference is still clear and easy to understand. Otherwise you could hit some negativity and frustration with your visitors
Alternative Options
Scrolling website navigation is something that is becoming more popular, in effect creating a one page site, over multiple pages. Like the following example which shows how clean & simple you can make your site…love the tagline too.
Click image to visit website and try scrolling website navigation
More Than Your Homepage
Don’t design your navigation from the home page out. All visitors don’t come via your homepage. Make sure no matter what page they arrive on, there is consistency in your website navigation
While you may think you’re being artsy and creative by having a different type of funky navigation on different pages, it’s not going to do you any favors.
Why Isn’t It Working?
Nothing is more frustrating to a visitor than navigation that doesn’t work. Make sure that you test everything, and review how your site loads in the all the major browsers.
Are You Mobile?
Increased access from mobile devices means that website navigation can be a complete pain in the ass if your site is not formatted for mobile browsing. Fortunately there’s an easy solution. WPTouch is a wordpress plugin that converts your site for mobile viewing, making it a much more pleasurable experience for your visitors.
Text vs Image
The vast majority of sites primary navigation will be text based (like here on Respectfully Disobedient) There is the option however to utilize image navigation, which can have a fantastic look and feel if done well like this one below.
click to visit website
Each of the Polaroids is a navigation link and becomes color when you mouse over. One thing to consider is load time if you decide to use this type of website navigation. As we all know…slow load times cause visitors to click away, optimize your images if you run with this style.
Flash Ain’t So Flash
While flash may be cool and interesting, creative and fun. It won’t do you any favors when it comes to search engine love…they can’t get in to read the code. While using flash in small doses may be fine for some areas of your site don’t use flash in your navigation
While its impossible to cover all the angles here in this post, and we haven’t even begun to touch on SEO aspects, I hope this post has given you some food for thought on the design of your website navigation. Please share it if you liked it.
I’ll have some more news on website structure and design coming up in the next couple of weeks, with a special offer for subscribers. If you’d like to get in on the action, make sure to sign up below.
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Great tips Jackie and totally agree about less is more. Not sure about the scroll navigation although it will be interesting to see if becomes a real trend.
Thanks Susan
I quite like the scroll navigation, but I think its only viable for certain applications.
ooooh…I was just going to ask you how your site re-design was taking shape and I thought I better take a look first.
Bam…low and behold I see the new design already rockin…Nice Job Susan!
Really clean, and fresh, has a more modern feel. Luv it
Thanks Jackie and still a work in progress. Getting to know the new Headway version was a little harder than I thought. Having said that it does have some cool features that for non coders is fantastic.
Haven’t downloaded or checked out the new version yet. I know I’ll only get distracted playing with new things
Thanks for the link to Chris’ website. I’m not sure that I’ve seen an example of scrolling navigation before or if I have, I certainly was not familiar with the terminology. That is extremely clever! I’ll definitely keep that in mind and will probably experiment with it at some point. It would need to be the right fit for the right client or maybe I could use it for a redesign of one of my old outdated sites. Actually, one may have just popped into my mind!
Sherryl Perry recently posted..Thanks to SEO a Newspaper Reporter in Pennsylvania Found my Blog
Hi Sherryl
I think the scrolling action is pretty cool and for the right kind of project I think would be a great fit. I came accross Chris’s site I think it was through a round up on Smashing Magazine, really like the simplicity of what hes done and the scolling works well for the objectives of the site.
Have fun with your new project, would love to see what you do
Very practical and helpful navigation tips, Jackie — thank you!
I enjoyed clicking over and checking out the website examples you’ve shared.
I’m not certain how my blog ranks in navigation or even if I’m doing it right. But so far, my readers haven’t made any derogatory comments from the peanut gallery. And believe me, they don’t hold back. LOL!
Melanie Kissell recently posted..I Don’t Want To Be A “Lead” When I Grow Up
Hey Melanie
There are some really creative people out there, doing some really cool and interesting stuff with navigation techniques. But in the end you have to think about how these play out for the reader. I don’t think you have any concerns with your Navigation, but I do have a few thoughts that may help. If you’d like I’ll email you some suggestions…let me know
Hello Jackie,
This is the first time, I’m on your blog. I was scrolling to the bottom of your homepage to have a quick look to your complete blog but couldn’t stop myself to click on this article’s title. Because navigation is one of my favorite topics. I mention this in many of my articles which are related to blogging.
To be honest, I thought it’d be cool to have multilevel dropdown menu. Spent lot of my time in fixing it according to my blog. But soon I realized it’s not that worthy. Even it may confuse and sometimes annoy my readers.
I tried, 3d flashing labels once. But removed it soon when I read it hurts SEO and Google doesn’t like it.
But there are many bloggers out there who love to have both of the above I mentioned. I should give them this article’s link,
Absolutely right about navigation that doesn’t work. I feel really annoyed when I click on something which I’m in search of and get ” OOPs Nothing found”.
Thanks to Hajra, at WBB who showed me the way to your blog.
I’d like to see you on my blog and let me know what you think about my blog design and navigation. oddblogger.com Let me know if you can figure it out easily that it’s on Blogger or WordPress.
Enjoyed the article.
One
Abhi Balani recently posted..Good Blogger And A Good Blog: What Are The Signs?
Hi Abhi
Thanks for finding your way over here from We Blog Better I was so stoked to be featured there.
Glad we share the same interest in Navigation. In my opinion its a hugely underrated element of peoples websites.
I’ll definately stop by your blog over the course of the weekend, and give you my thoughts.
Look forward to checking it out.
Thanks again for stopping by and leaving your comments, its great to meet you.
Yes, poor navigation is bad, but I’d like to add another factor (also related to navigation) that is driving the visitors away, and that is poor website loading speed.
This used to be one of my problems, and still is in a way.
Most of the visitors are not waiting longer than 5 seconds for a page to load, and having a slow hosting server is sure to chase your visitors away.
Most hosting servers are blaming the multitude of plugins installed on a WordPress platforms, some of them directly advising to remove some specific plugins, such as “related posts” plugins, which I think is total BS.
Then I was faced with the problem, that if the server was located in the US. the visitors from US experienced reasonably good loading speed as compared to visitors from another country which had difficulties with page loading.
All in one, a good hosting is crucial. I’m yet to find one
On webpagetest.org one can “Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds.”
I find it very useful.
Andy recently posted..About “Making Money Online”
Yep totally agree, page load time kills attention span. I have run some tests myself on plugins and load time, and I have found there are a few that impacted on my page load speed. I used pingdom to check mine.
The hosting thing I haven’t particularly noticed an issue. I use hostgator.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your experiences Andy.