Is Your SiteNav Sending Visitors In The Right Direction?

If your website is not clearly mapped out and signposted, how will your visitors know where to go?

Worst case scenario – you invest time and money on an online marketing campaign to drive traffic to your site; they arrive, they can’t work out your site navigation or are sent to the wrong page – they lose patience and their forefinger clicks the mouse- they’re outta there!

Think it can’t happen to you? Think again! Why? you might ask – as far as you’re concerned your site menu works fine. Precisely, as far as you’re concerned! Did you check thoroughly with your website design team, tested it’s usability first with others?

Whether you’re creating a new site, going for a website refresh or fixing site accessibility issues, site navigation plays a crucial role in user experience and customer conversions.

The best website navigation always starts with organizing content correctly.

It should mirror your online content as an accurate, efficient system and provide users with a consistent route map to move through your site effortlessly. SiteNavs must reflect and support your brand identity, and seamlessly fit into the rest of your site layout and design.

Web navigation is nothing more than another method of accessing information in an online environment. Most sites don’t house all of their content on a homepage, and website content isn’t usually arranged in alphabetical order. Information is cut up into smaller, manageable pieces, and users must manoeuvre through the site to find information. Seek advice from your web design agency to understand the common layout types so you really know what will best suit your customer’s needs.

Navigating websites is a learned behaviour, not a conscious action so design must be intuitive – users expect to see certain information when they click a familiar tab, such as ‘About us’ or ‘Our Services’. Reinforced, learned behaviour helps them successfully navigate through new sites.

A correctly built intuitive navigation site should have:

• All pages containing basic site navigation.
• Navigation states (on/off).
• Consistent page titles indicating the current page.
• Consistent Hypertext link naming, exclusive to associated pages.
• All navigation leading somewhere specific and is obvious to the user.
• Category naming directly related to content type.
• Global site categories or main sections mutually exclusive and grouped intuitively.
• Similar types of navigation elements grouped together and visually consistent, indicating link priority and logical methodology.
• An HTML site map included for navigation and SEO purposes.

Remove common navigation mistakes such as :

• Global navigation that contains too many or too few categories.
• Pages without a clear call-to-action.
• Not linking directly to the item named.
• Priority content that is buried or hard to find.