|
Make_Your_Site_Easy_To_Navigate
| Make Your Site Easy To Navigate
Competition on the Internet is fierce. Just a mouse click away
are hundreds of other sites offering the same products/services
that you offer. So when all your hard work has paid off and a
potential client has found your site, you want to be sure they
can easily find what they want so they can buy it from you.
According to the Giga research group, 70% of all web site
visitors leave a site without finding what they came for.
Imagine what will happen to your bottom line if 70% of all
prospective clients can't find what they are looking for? You
work hard to get people to your site, don't let poor website
design make almost three quarters of them leave empty handed.
To make your site easy to navigate you need to lay it out
logically. This will make your products and services easy to
find. To start out with, group similar items together. Let's say
you sell shirts, pants and coats. Group all of your coats
together, then pants and then shirts. Don't list a few coats,
then some pants, then a couple more coats, then some shirts. A
person may go to your site looking for coats. They scroll down
the page and see a couple of coats, then see some shirts and
figure that those are all the coats you have. They didn't see
what they wanted and left, but if they had scrolled down one
more screen, they would have found the exact coat they wanted.
A better solution is to list all of your coats, then cross sell.
You could say, "If you need a shirt, use this link," then send
them off to your shirt page. Or to be more specific, next to
each coat (or shirt or pants) say, "Use this link to find the
shirts and pants that go perfectly with this coat." You can have
the link go to a page with shirts and pants whose style and
color go with that coat. Not only will this let your prospective
clients find all related products and make upselling easier, but
if they don't know how to match colors or styles then you will
put them at ease by making the selections for them.
If you have products or services that can't be grouped together,
or you just have a huge list of items, then use a search engine.
Most webhosts offer the option of having a search engine on your
site. This make finding things on large sites easier. Many
people will use a search engine without even looking around a
site to find what they want. They just find using a search
engine to be faster and easier.
There are other ways to make your site easy to navigate. One is
to have a site map. It can be as simple as a list of links to
each one of your pages, or I have also seen them get more
complicated, so that below each link to a page are all the main
links on that page. Using the clothing example above, you would
have a link to the coat page, then sublinks to wool coats,
polyester coats and so on. I often use site maps to get around
large sites, when they offer them. They are easy to put together
and update and can be very useful if you don't want a search
engine on your site or as another tool that visitors can use
besides a search engine.
When you are laying out your site, be sure not to bury a page or
section. By that I mean that visitors to your site should be
able to get to any page or section using no more than three
links. It's not as hard it may sound. If you find yourself
burying a page someplace, just redesign the layout or create a
page that will let the buried page be closer to a main page. So
if you want people to buy socks on your site, don't make them
click to the clothes page, then click to the coat page, then
click to the sundry page, then click to the footwear page, then
click to the sock page, then click to the wool sock page. Make
the sundry page one of your main pages, like the clothing page.
Another thing to remember is to place your links in the same
place on every page, so visitors can easily navigate on each
page. On my site I place the links at the top and bottom of each
page, so if they read down a long list of events they don't have
to scroll back up to the top to use a link. Of course, you could
also put a "back to top" link at the bottom of each page
instead. I put "back to top" links after the end of each book
listing on my Books page. So if they wanted to see just one
book, after reading about it they can easily go back to the top.
Be sure that your links and buttons are easy to read, and
descriptive of where the visitor will be take. If you have a
coat page, call the link "Coats," not "Things To Keep You Warm,"
and be sure the text can be easily read. Don't make the text too
small or similar to the background color. No black on purple or
yellow on white.
When laying out your website think like a person who is visiting
for the first time. Pretend you don't know anything about the
site, you're in a rush and you're trying to find something on
the site that Google said was there. Make the experience of
visiting your site, easy, fast and enjoyable.
About the author:
Do you need a website for your small business or yourself? I
make website design fast, easy and affordable. Go to my site
NOW! Free monthly newsletter too.
|
|
| |
| |
