Efficient Navigation Can Make Or Break a Website

Some websites are a joy to use. You arrive on the home page and within seconds you are exploring the site with no problems at all.

But then there are those other websites. We've all seen them. As soon as you get on the home page it's clear that design has triumphed over common sense. There is no menu to navigate by. The home page is either littered with too much information, making it difficult to decide where to go next, or it is so minimalist that it's hard to tell what the website is about in the first place.

If content is still king, then navigation must come a very close second. Online marketing demands that your website is as good as it can possibly be. People are too impatient to hang around and try to figure out how your website works. If they can't arrive and find their way around straightaway with no problem at all then they will go elsewhere.

But some webmasters seem to think that people will stick around and give them orders no matter what they do. This is wishful thinking. If you know there are other websites that sell the same thing or provide similar information to the site you're on, you're not going to hang around are you? Why struggle to understand the navigation system of a sub-standard site when you can click away and go elsewhere instead?

In this sense, navigation is a crucial part of your web site design. You need to be sure that people can go where you need them to go, and this begins with knowing what purpose your site will have.

Think about it for a moment. If you want people to buy stock from your website, you need to be able to break that stock down into sensible categories. If you want them to sign up for a free newsletter so you can build your mailing list, you need to make sure they know it's available. It's no good tucking it away on a page that is hard to find.

As such, your home page is the front door onto the rest of your website. If you imagine that front page as being the entrance door to a huge department store set on many levels, what's the first thing you'll see? In real life it would be a huge sign telling you which departments are on which floor. Websites are no different.

This is where a professional website designer is worth their weight in gold. The experience they have of putting countless websites together for different reasons and different clients makes it easy to produce a website that works on all kinds of levels.

But this doesn't just apply to new websites. If you have a website live on the internet at the moment and you know it isn't doing as well as it should be, invest in the advice of a professional and benefit from the difference it makes.

Web Profits specializes in search engine optimization, online marketing & web design, helping businesses generate profits from the Internet. For a free report on 'The Secrets of Online Marketing for Offline Businesses' visit SEO.

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