Designing an effective website is not just about slapping up some amazing graphics and watching the visitors get all happy – no, it’s about giving your visitors an experience that pulls them back. Since you have read the title, you know we are here to tell you about site navigation and how to do it well. There is more to a successful site other than navigation, but you still need to understand what you have to do with it.
A lot of sites, like blogs, come with a major part of navigation already done – but there is still more to it. Well, you have all the nav bars all over the pages, and then there is the anchor text which is a part of this topic, as well. What you always need to focus on is making things as simple and as easy to understand as possible. If you want to talk about change, well then the amount of change and innovation we have witnessed in the recent years is almost staggering. We have seen some pretty clever new methods of doing navigation, and some are really pretty impressive. Now it’s more about giving a better user experience by creatively providing navigation options all over your site.
Never neglect visitor convenience; for example the placement of additional or even redundant links at the end of content. If you wonder about how useful it will be, then place a tracking script so you can monitor how much it is used. We believe this is something you must do on all of your longer pages otherwise you will be forcing people to scroll all the way up.
Most of the time you will send people to your home page, and that means it has an big role to play. Just make very sure that all of your other pages contain a prominent link taking them back to the homepage. Your visitors, no matter where they are on your website, should be able to click on the homepage link and zoom back to it. Also, in addition to the text link you should use the logo if you have one, or the header as an entire link to the home page.
What you will accomplish with excellent navigation is helping to increase the stickiness of your site. The consequences of not paying enough attention to your navigation are legendary, we think. So do not neglect this critical aspect of web design, and getting it right will only help you.
For more information check out the SEO Link Monster Review page.
Filed under Advertising & Site Promotion by on Jan 27th, 2012. Comment. 