What is the need of the time is the most important factor that you must figure out as a website developer. Navigation and Search is one of the demanding need of the website. Let's figure out the importance of each.
A recent survey says that the average time a person spends on a website for the first time is atrociously low-which not more than 20 seconds. So these 20 seconds build the first impression for your website based on various aspects. The most influential of them would be “Navigation”.
Navigation is the ease with which a person can traverse the whole width and the contents of your website, which includes all the important inner pages. The right links should be comfortably identified by the readers and can seek reader’s attention. Here comes the importance of the reader’s first choice or the first link which the reader clicks.
If the reader’s first choice is not down the right path, then rest of the information in the website looks quite absurd to the reader. The first choice or the link should be highlighted, deciding the target user’s point of view. Repeated traffic on sites has lot to do with how effortlessly the target users can find what they wanted. So, a good navigation can speed up the viewers search, it helps to breakdown the website into logical and understandable parts. It should be simple and structural, so the viewers can stay on the site for longer time. Steve Krug had pointed in his book”that a user can be on your website and have no idea how large the site is”. A good navigation means that a user can effortlessly navigate through multiple departments of your page without even knowing the complexity of your site. Conclusively the basic navigation features should be simple and purpose-driven. The classical AIDA (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action) model logics work well in all possible kinds of websites of different genre.
The landing page can have a lot of navigation features like-sections, tags, authors, search, site maps, footers etc. All these make the landing page organized and optimized.
Search is a value added feature within the navigation bracket. Using the search feature, a visitor can enter his query, click on the search button to narrow down their results. It is one of the quickest ways to find the required result. It works best when you have multiple services or products to offer in your site. The visitor enters your site, searches for the particular service or product, the search engine shows up the matching results, saving ample amount of time.
Navigation and Search are two most influential features which every designer must focus on; if these features are not managed tactfully the bounce rate of your site might go high causing the revisit rate to decrease. However, researchers have concluded that navigation plays a more crucial role than search. Researches have done some extensive task testing with a technical audience on a website. 70 percent started the task by clicking on a link, 30 percent used search. Conclusively, Navigation and search should go hand in hand if you need to build a quality website or we can say your website designing is incomplete without Search and Navigation.
