Why good navigation is key to your sites success

You are about to design your website and your head is full of ideas of how it will look, the colours, the images, the overall effect and impact it will have on your audience. But have you understood the real importance of the navigation system that you have used in your design?

The value of good navigation architecture in the infrastructure of your website should not be underestimated. Good website navigation architecture is the most important job in the development process for any web designer. Many website designs are not constructed with page rank considerations in mind and this is where they will fall short in terms of search engine rankings.

In layman’s terms, page rank is measured by how many links any website page has from other website pages. There is a complicated science behind it with mathematical equations to boggle the most intelligent of minds. However, what it all boils down to is that your website will rank much higher up a Google search if the navigation layout is well designed. Optimal navigation layout should allow both search engines and visitors the best of experiences - a human being will search a website in a different way to a search engine spider as the latter can only read html.

Any good website designer will first ask their client who their audience is before they begin to design the website structure and create their site map. Users will benefit from an easy-to-navigate system and will become quickly confused by difficult and conflicting sites. The types of pages which are useful to a designer as navigation tools include: home pages; index pages; navigation bars; next/previous navigation – these are all useful ways for promoting products and services, as well as driving traffic to other pages. During the initial design process, it is also important to decide whether to have multiple levels of navigation, using sub menus, or whether a flatter navigation level is the better option.

Some of the benefits of having a good navigation scheme are that there will be fewer clicks in the click path, the content will be clear and is more likely to be read, and the visitor will be able to see more clearly where they should go for the information they need. In essence, visitor usability will be optimised. They should always be able to get to the information they require with ease and with minimal searching or you will lose them and they will go elsewhere.

So in reality, it is all in the design process. Laying it out up front and planning the design well will make the rest of the process much easier and the end result will be higher page rankings along with the most important bit – an altogether better customer experience.

Copyright © Peter Moore 2009 - Co-Founder of EzWeb123.com