How to Create Effective Navigation on Your Site

Joshua Texeria   – Raleigh, NC
123Triad: Web Design & SEO Company

How to Create Effective Navigation on Your Site

There’s a good chance, if your content is good, and your keywords doing their job, that a lot of your site’s traffic comes from search results on one of the many search engines, not through your site’s “front door” – the home page.

Once they are on your site though, if what you say is interesting and useful, chances are that they will want to have a look around. That’s why navigation is still key. Good navigation helps a visitor to find information they need quickly and efficiently, or idly browse you site for interesting pieces. Either way, you navigation needs to be up to scratch!

Here are a few useful tips for designing user friendly, functional navigation on your site:

• Creativity is great. Just not when it comes to navigation. People have  gotten used to finding it in specific places – on top of your site, or on the left. Don’t move it around. It will just frustrate your users.
• Ditto page names. “About us” and other clichéd page names have been around so long, they’ve almost become the standard. Changing them confuses visitors, and makes it more difficult to find what they are looking for. Stick to the norm on this one.
• Always link your logo to your home page. It’s an easy way for people to find their way back to square one, and again, it’s almost expected.
• Never leave out the search bar. Another fixture on almost all sites, it’s become that for a reason – it works. Help people find what they want by including it.
• Set your navigation links to highlight when the visitor’s cursor hovers over them – it’s a great way to make sure visitors know where they’re likely to end up once they click!
• Show the navigation trail at the top of the page. If visitors are navigating multiple levels of your site to get to a specific article or piece of content, it’s a good idea to remind them how they got there!
• Make the “breadcrumb trail” clickable too (insert links) that way, they can go back one or two levels if they want to!

Organizing content on your website is a tricky business, even for you, the designer. Expecting visitors to know their way around is ludicrous if you look at it this way! Make your site easy to navigate, and keep your visitors coming back!

123Triad webdesign offers affordable custom website design. Our full service website design company only hires certified website designers. Please contact us today on 1-800-720-0816 for your next web site design project.

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