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.