Internet Help for Small Business

Website Navigation System is Crucial

While it's important that your website should be pleasing to the eye, complex graphics, cute icons, and flashy symbols are worthless if your visitors can't find their way around the site. A good navigation system is crucial and can mean success or failure for a website, particularly so if it's a business site.

Traditionally the navigation menu is placed immediately below the header area or on the left hand side of the web page. Usability studies have shown that visitors, because of this custom, tend to look first in these areas.

Wherever you decide to place your navigation menu, try to be as consistent as possible so that visitors don't get confused. For this site I have opted for a menu on the right side of the page that's visible for each main category and also for pages within each category.

However, for web pages within a category, I have also added a breadcrumb trail at the top of the page (as on this page, immediately above the headline).

The purpose of the breadcrumb trail is to let visitors know where they are, while giving them the option to click back to the site's home page or the category home page.

This may seem somewhat unconventional, but because of the learning nature of this site, I wanted to encourage visitors to read through the pages in sequence rather than jumping around as one would normally do on a website.

Three to Four Clicks

You may need to design a menu with categories and sub-categories to achieve this. So, for example, a marketing company could have a category called “Internet and Web” with general information about its range of Internet services, and under this, sub-categories for “Web Design”, “Search Engine Optimization”, and “Email Campaigns” with specific information about these services.

Usability studies indicate that a navigation menu should not comprise too many links. Experts suggest keeping these under 10 as the more choices users are given, the more difficult it is for them to make a decision. Also, if you provide an abundance of links, your visitors may get the impression that the site is too complex to easily find what they're looking for.

Why Navigation is so Important

The reason users visit your site is to get information. If visitors can’t find the information they are searching for, they will simply click away.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out that “most Web designers blatantly ignore usability and design for their own pleasure (or worse, the boss’s pleasure) instead of trying to satisfy user needs”.

In one of his Alertbox articles titled Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First, Nielsen says the biggest design flaws destroying business value typically involve:

• Failing to communicate clearly so that users understand you. Users allocate minimal time to initial website visits, so you must quickly convince them that the site’s worthwhile.
• Failing to provide information users want. Users must be able to easily determine whether your services meet their needs and why they should do business with you.
• Failing to offer simple, consistent page design, clear navigation, and an information architecture that puts things where users expect to find them.

“Get these three right,” he says, “and you’ll enhance your site’s credibility, ease a user’s way through the site, and thus do far more for the site’s business value than any JavaScript trick.”

Back to Articles

Copyright © 2010-2011 Privacy: Your privacy is guaranteed. Personal information, including email addresses, will never be sold or given to third parties. See our Privacy Policy for further details.