Can your website visitors get around easily?
Everyone knows how to use a website don’t they? You have gone to the trouble of creating your content and you can easily understand how to find it, so your visitors will be able to do the same right? Right??
Well, no. Whilst the services and content you have created may be straightforward to you, for others it may not be quite so simple. Often, pages of content are created when you have time, without further planning, this can lead to some pages being harder to find than would be preferable.
So, how can you create a navigation across your website that is straightforward and easy to find for people AND search engines? There are a few tips underneath that might just prove useful!
Most important website features
Plan your navigation beforehand
This simple strategy will help you keep your navigation in order and guide your audience across different content on your website. Get a piece of paper and a pen and draw out your navigation and join the pages together that you would ideally like your visitors to travel through.
This content could be a blog post about an aspect of your services, which may contain information that would lead to a different content piece that would then have a conversion action. Planning your navigation this way will allow you to understand the relationships different pieces of content will play whilst also building your marketing funnels!
Keep it simple
Your navigation needs to be simple and easy to understand. To many options will put people off going further. Clearly identify sections of your website and link to these different areas of your site to make getting there easy.
A mistake lots of people will make is to put things like case studies and blog posts in the same place, testimonials on one page and without links directing people to see them, one page listing all services – again, without links to the particular sections that might be of interest.
If your visitors can’t easily find what they are looking for, they will leave.
Stats from Hubspot.com
Mobile & desktop navigation
Mobile and desktop website visitors often have different intent.
On a desktop, people are more likely to research you, your company and spend more time looking around your content.
On a mobile, visitors are generally more targeted and already understand what they are looking for and are more likely to visit one page then leave – hopefully with the information they were looking for.
Due to this intent difference, the navigation on these devices can and probably should be different.
On a desktop, you can have multiple dropdown menus and sidebar navigation, but on a mobile, this type of view won’t work as well due to the stacking of the columns.
Consider stripping down the menu items for mobile visitors and think about how mobile visitors could find your content if they decide to go wandering.
Many mobile visitors will simply be looking for contact information. As well as clear, simple navigation, your contact details – phone number, email address etc, should be clear and easy to find on your website. Many websites display this easy contact info in the header. Do you?
More navigation tips
- use a colour contrast on your menus and make sure the link colour when hovered over doesn’t clash with your background colours.
- Use the footer area to link to other pages on your website – privacy policies, cookie policies etc are common in Footers, but you can also link to other main areas of your site for easy access.
- Make your navigation labels clear, not only will this help people get around your website, but also improve your SEO. ‘Web Design Services’ is better than ‘Services’ for example.
- Add breadcrumbs to your posts. This offers an easy way for users to get back to the main pages, improves SEO (as its another link to your content) and allows more of your content to be easily accessible.
If you need help with your navigation, or any other aspect of your website then we would love to hear from you. Fill in the form on the page and leave us a message and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Find out more hints and tips about web design, but reading more web design posts.
