Today I will be discussing how to make your site navigation more user friendly and, as a bonus, Search Engine friendly. This is a large subject, and I will likely have to break it down into more than one post.
Create a natural breakdown of your information and make it flow. Make it easy for users to go from general information on your site to more specific information.
Don’t:
• Make it overly complex. All your pages linking to one another isn’t always the best.
Use mostly text for navigation – Text links make the pages easier for search engines to crawl and improve accessibility. Make sure you use css standards – you can do a lot with css to make your links look attractive.
Don’t:
• Have navigation based entirely on images or flash – this slows down the page, makes it less accessible, and often adds large amounts of code (one other trick to optimization is code to content ratio – a whole other post – coming soon!)
Utilize “breadcrumbs” – These are rows of internal navigations, leading the user back to general information, from the most detailed information. It shows a hierarchy of info.
Having good navigation on your site will improve your user experience, lengthen the amount of time your user spends on the site, increases the possiblility of your user finding exactly what they need while there, and as an added bonus, you get the benefit of a potentially higher position in the search engines because you took the time to implement it.
If you need help with your navigation, or any other aspect of useability or SEO of your website, feel free to give me a call at 402-210-3283 (Steve). Factors like these are reasons you should hire an expert to develop your web site. You want to be found, you want your users to buy or contact you once they have found you!