Website Navigation
Understand your visitor's journey
Your visitors are probably seekers, almost certainly looking for some specific information, answer or solution. The easier you make it for them to find what they're looking for, the more likely they are to convert to a customer or client.
The art of designing a good navigation system is more just adding menus and links in the places visitors expect to find them. It involves putting yourself in their shoes and guiding their journey through your web site using various visual cues.
What would your customers or clients say are the most important reasons why they chose you? What are the most important aspects of your business that convert visitors into clients or customers?
What Visitors expect to see
Visitors know to look for information in specific places. In addition to the main menu, it is common to have a footer menu with links to Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, Sitemap and other less frequently accessed pages.
Good navigation helps visitors find what they want faster, so hopefully they’ll stay on your site longer. The longer they stay the more likely they are to purchase your goods or services, return to read your latest musings (good for seo) and link to your site as a useful resource (also good for seo).
On a larger site you may want to include additional navigation in a sidebar, secondary top menu, pop-out menu or a breadcrumb trail.
Menus are broken down into Categories or Parent Pages with Sub-Categories or Child Pages nested underneath them. The Child Pages of an individual Parent Page are together known as Siblings.
Account Login, Cart, Categories and Search
Visitors expect to see access to login and checkout in the top menu of an Ecommerce or membership site and a breadcrumb trail which tells them which category or subcategory they are viewing.
They also expect to see a category menu either at the top or side of the product page.
If you have a lot of content pages as well as a shop, you may want to consider secondary navigation menus, and optionally filters, to make it easier for customers to find the products they are looking for.
Ecommerce categories can act as Filters, for example when a Clothing Category is broken down into Mens, Women’s and Children’s Clothing. They can also be used to show Related (Sibling) Products or Categories such as Women’s Tops, Women’s Skirts, Women’s Trousers & Women’s Shoes.
Sibling Navigation
On a large web site it is useful for visitors to see a secondary menu of Sibling Pages which is specific to the category they are currently exploring. Sibling Navigation only appears on the relevant pages, in the above case Women’s Tops, Women’s Skirts, Women’s Trousers & Women’s Shoes.
Tags, Taxonomy & Variations Filters
Filtered Navigation is commonly used in Ecommerce sidebars to allow customers to select a specific price range, colour, size, brand or other relevant Variation using drop-downs, sliders, check boxes or radio buttons.
Tags and Custom Taxonomies (for example book or movie genre) are used for looser connections between products or topics and represented as a dropdown or word-cloud.
Information Blocks
Rows of content containing several columns with some short text and buttons, images or icons, can be used as quick links to other content of interest related to the content of an individual page, category or sibling set. These also help to break up the content of long pages.
Back to Top Navigation
If your main navigation is at the top of the page, as opposed to fixed and scrolling with the content, we recommend a Back To Top button for the benefit of visitors, especially on long pages.
