Practices
We all know the feeling of arriving at a website without a well-planned, logical navigation structure. It’s like someone dropped you in the middle of a huge shopping mall where there’s no info desk and no store list – just endless rows of shops in all directions. Don’t ever let visitors to your website feel like this. You may lose them forever in less than 30 seconds. Below are a few tried and trusted tips on making your website navigation more user-friendly.
7 Best Web Design Navigation Practices
Your navigation menu should be designed around your goals for having a website in the first place. Are you trying to convince the visitor to contact you for further information? Are you trying to make a sale? Or does your website provide valuable information to establish your firm as an expert in its field? All these different scenarios will require a different approach to the navigation structure.
2. Prioritize Menu Items
Your website’s navigation structure should work like a funnel where visitors enter at the top and are directed to whatever they are looking for. Within your menu, there should e.g. be a clear priority, with the most important options clearly standing out. In this regard, it’s good to know that the items that appear near the top and the bottom of the menu attract the most attention from visitors. This is, therefore, where the most important pages should be listed. If your ‘Contact Us’ link is somewhere near the middle of a 30-item drop-down menu, don’t expect a lot of incoming messages.
3. Use Separate Menus For Different Visitor Categories
If you are trying to reach different audiences with the same website, e.g. employers and job-seekers, the best option might be to have these two options at a very prominent spot on the home page. This will prevent one group of visitors from having to struggle through endless menu options, none of them relevant to their needs at that particular moment. The Muse is a good example of a large brand successfully employing this strategy on its website.
4. Add A Site Search Functionality
Research shows that the conversion rate of websites with search functionality is nearly twice as high as that of their counterparts without this option. It makes a lot of sense. A site search engine makes it much easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for. The bigger your website, and the more different categories of information it contains, the more pressing the need for a site search function becomes.
5. Use A Hamburger Menu
Although it first became a familiar site on mobile devices (where the screen real estate is rather limited), hamburger menus are increasingly being used on the desktop versions of major websites. This simple icon with a few horizontal lines is a minimalist option that will fit in well with just about any design. And with so many well-known brands nowadays using hamburger menus on their sites (e.g. IKEA), most people will immediately know that this is where they should start their journey through your website.
6. Make Sure Your Logo Links Back To The Home Page
Many website owners still make the mistake of not having their company logo link back to their home page. There is no need for the site menu to have a ‘Homepage’ option. Just add the company logo at the top of every page and link it to your website’s home page. For the vast majority of visitors, this will be totally intuitive since it has now become part of current web design conventions.
The fat footer, sometimes also called the mega footer, is a list of links to every single important page on your website. As the name implies, it appears at the bottom of the home screen. One option is to arrange the menu options alphabetically, but if there are many of them a better idea is to use category headings and group related menu options together.
