Does Your Navigation Help or Hinder Your Success?
Friday, February 3rd, 2012Maybe one of the most challenging aspects of teaching others about business on the net is rank beginners do not know anything at all about it. Just imagine taking a complete newbie and trying to explain absolutely everything on affordable seo services.
So you can easily see that it really can be dangerous to attempt some strategies until you are completely sure of what you are doing.
Just remember that as you go forth because we guarantee you will see what we are talking about. Be forewarned as you travel in your journey because always suspecting there is something else that is part of the puzzle will keep you sharp. If you do not have a lot of experience, set up all you do with your marketing so you can see the results in some quantitative way.
Designing an effective website is not just about slapping up some amazing graphics and watching the visitors get all happy – no, it’s about giving your visitors an experience that pulls them back. Yes, you will need to get a lot of things right, and of course our topic of discussion concerns site navigation. When your navigation is excellent, then at least that is one very important thing you will not have to worry about.
The use of Flash on websites has greatly decreased these days since Flash isn’t really that user friendly and tends to be unreadable by the search engines. But if you are still willing to use Flash on your homepage or other pages then make sure you’re giving your visitors an HTML alternative. This is mainly because not everybody is fine with going through Flash pages and may actually find the navigation annoying. Another important point to consider is your bounce rate, and that is something Google looks at with their search algorithm. We do not feel it is worth the risk in terms of the numbers of visitors who may potentially be turned-off by the lack of an alternative.
One good idea to keep in mind is that everything should be just about two clicks away from everything else. Keep in mind that your main link groupings have to be in place, and they cannot deviate across your site. A well designed navigation makes it easy for visitors to spot the links they’re looking for, which basically means that you can’t just play around with colors and your design, changing it at each step. There are unspoken and unknown factors and qualities that people respond to, and a consistent navigation structure would be one of them.
Of course it all depends on what your marketing is all about, but landing pages to pages within your site are often very effective. If they’re coming through a search engine for example then they may first visit some other internal page on your site.
This is why the navigation that you have on your other pages should be properly structured and synchronized with the homepage. So then it becomes a simple matter of giving freedom and capability to see what else you have to offer. Obviously all of this is good to know before you begin building a site, but if you have sites that need to be revamped then that should be done, as well. What you will accomplish with excellent navigation is helping to increase the stickiness of your site. Overall, things can get pretty confusing even on a well designed website if the navigation is hard to understand. Do not forget to take action on this because there are lots of people who will not do that even though it will help them.