Web Nagivation -- A Strangely Important Topic

Today's topic is your website navigation. Ready?

First, what is it you want your website to do? Think about it for a minute.

Are you selling? Giving info? Is it there just to impress and get your potential customer to pick up the phone? Essential to your success is figuring out what you want your website to do and why. There's no wrong answer but it's smart for you to give this some thought and figure it out BEFORE you start your website, whether you're building from scratch or redesigning an older site. I promise you it'll cost you time and/or money if you don't do this step first, because when you DO figure it out, you'll have to fix the website to reflect your site's new mission.

One area of your website that needs the most thought is its navigation. (You know, the little links that help you get around -- yes, navigate -- the site.) From Day 1, your visitors are "learning" your website. You're teaching them how you want them to get around. Even if the look of the web site changes, the navigation should remain essentially the same, unless you're changing your goals. If you decide to entirely change directions, then perhaps all new navigation is a good thing.

If navigation isn't coming to you easily, try this. Write down every topic you want to see covered on your website. Then, group the like items. You might have some groups of five items and some groups might only have one. That's perfectly fine. Give them all group titles, that now becomes your navigation.

Still not there? Then take a minute. Sit back. Envision where you want your website to be in one year. In five years. You probably have an idea of what you'll add to the web. Do those new topics fit in with your current ones? While they don't have to, it's a good idea to see where they might fall in for the future. This way, you'll have a bit of advance planning on either adding new sections or simply adding content in the future.

If all this is just more than you can deal with, talk with your web or marketing professional. They can do it for you or help you do it. No matter how it gets done, it really should be done PRIOR to building or redesigning the site.

Once you decide on your navigation and implement it, from time to time, you'll probably want to add new sections -- no problem. Your visitors can see something new and click on it and incorporate the new area into the way they navigate your site.

All this is about training your customer to find your site helpful. Do everything you can to make it the easiest part of their visit to your site, so they can simply focus on your jewelry, not how to find what they are looking for.

Questions? Call me. 310-937-8997.

posted by Caroline Stanley @ 9:43 AM