If you’re running your own business, you will appreciate that having an online presence is vital in this digital era. Having a great looking site is important but your customers won’t hang around for long if the navigation is confusing. Customers want fast search results and clear, concise directions or you run the risk of them losing patience and leaving your site. Here are some tips for making sure your website is user friendly and functioning at it’s best for you:
- Be consistent – the navigation of your site must be consistent in both how and where information appears on your site. If the site is easy to use this will increase your visitors’ ability to find relevant information more quickly. If your navigation is not consistent from page to page, your visitors will lose their bearings and must keep reorienting themselves. After a short period of time, they will simply give up.
- Be clear with categories – if your navigation contains multiple sections, categories or sub-categories then these must be clearly defined. For example, category headings must be separated visually from the sub-categories, even if the categories are links themselves.
- Make sure all navigation tools are clickable links – When using multiple categorical divisions in your navigation, all heading elements should be clickable links.
- Be accurate with navigation titles as visitors should have a good idea of what they will find on a page even before clicking any link. This is true whether it’s a main navigation link or an internal text link. Use accurate wording to describe the linked page so visitors know what they’re going to get. Make sure all your link descriptions, whether textual or in an image, accurately represent the corresponding pages.
- Making sure your in-site search facility actually works is also very important. When using an in-site search feature, the search results page should always produce relevant results. It must allow for misspellings, show related items and even produce results for products that are linked if the searched item is unavailable. Search results that return a “no products found” message is incredibly frustrating and enough to lead to site abandonment. For a Web design Agency Leicester, visit https://www.freshwebservices.com/web-design-leicester.
If you’re unsure about what will work for your site, have a look at other websites and see how they use their navigation. What works well, what do you like and what doesn’t work so well? Test out your site multiple times from the point of view of the end user and see how it feels. It might be the case that you need to make several adjustments before you are happy with the finished product. Don’t expect your customers to have infinite patience. You don’t get many second chances when it comes to a customer’s judgment on how responsive your site is. The statistics are tough – most people spend less than a minute on a website and only 25% will actually read what’s written.