This is Hint Number Two in my series on ‘Successful Website Design’. Once you’ve considered your audience, now it’s time to plan out your clear, logical navigation.
Source: eschoolnews.com via Christine on Pinterest
Navigation refers to ease of accessibility of information. Do you only have one page, with everything on that page? Or have you categorised your information so that ‘like’ is with ‘like’, and therefore easy to find? Have you used tabs with Drop-down menus? Are there call-out menus from within these? Are all of these tabs and menus clear and logical, or is information placed under categories where it doesn’t really fit?
As you may (or may not) know, I run the Seniors-only social network GoodOldTalk.com – and this site needed quite a bit of forethought with regard to navigation. Firstly, we didn’t want Seniors who might not be particularly computer-literate to be overwhelmed; but on the other hand, we didn’t want those who’d been using computers for years to find the site too simplistic. We also had to consider vision problems, physical barriers – and therefore we came up with five large tabs on the right hand side, with larger than normal font size. Each of these tabs then led to the main sections of the site, with no drop-down menus to make things potentially more confusing.
Compare this to a school website, however, and the differences are remarkable. Several tabs (generally at the top of the page) and their drop-down menus – and call-out menus within these menus – lead to dozens and dozens of pages. But the difficulty here is still making the HomePage accessible, and visitor-friendly, without cluttering up the screen, which in turn makes the vital information too difficult to find.
My tip here is to categorise. Really, really well. Your information needs to be clearly and logically organised, and I can’t emphasise that enough. And once you think you’re done, get a focus group together to test it. Can they retrieve the information they need? And how long does it take? Would it help to have a ‘search button’ on your site? Or a ‘Site Map‘? (Although one thought that crosses my mind it that, if you need a Site Map, then perhaps your information organisation wasn’t clear enough in the first place! Either that, or you’re trying to give too much information in the one site, and you need to split it up over several sites. Some government or large corporations fall into this trap…)
So… make it clear. Make it logical. Make it easy to find. And check these – regularly!
All done? Then it’s time for Hint Number Three – vet your information!
