You have a business and you want it to flourish. You are designing a website, as you are aware of the importance of online presence of the businesses these days. But when you are designing a website, you need to take care of a lot of things. A lot of times it is observed that the potential customers land on a website, but do not go to any other page. They leave from the landing page itself, thus increasing the bounce rate of the website.
Why does this happen?
A lot of times, this can be blamed on the poor navigation of the website. If the navigation isn’t good enough, the visitors tend to lose their way once they land on the website. As a result, they leave the website without visiting the other pages.
Why does this happen?
Mostly, a poor navigation is the result of improper understanding of how the user would like to move around your website. And this leads to a number of mistakes committed while designing the website navigation. You need to be aware of those errors to ensure that they are not affecting the design of your website navigation.
Here’s a quick sneak peek at some of the most common navigation designing errors committed by web designers.
Not Following the Standard Placement
In most cases, the navigation can be found at the top in a horizontal manner or as a vertical navigation at the left side of the page. Are you planning to place it somewhere else on the webpage? It can be a major mistake, as most of the internet users are accustomed to finding it at the traditional places.
How will placing the navigation in the standard places help?
Your site is surely going to be more user friendly. It will be easier for them to find the content. You might be looking to make your site different from those of your competitors to attract the attention of the customers. But the navigation is surely not the place to try it.
Overstuffed Navigation Bar
How many pages do you have in your website? Are you planning to provide a way to reach all of those right from the navigation bar?
This is probably not going to be effective. Instead, this is going to confuse the website visitors to a great extent. Besides, the short-term memory usually helps a person to remember just seven items. So, it’s important to limit the number of items in the navigation bar to that number. You should refrain from sharing other links on the homepage as well. This will keep the homepage clean and attractive. Moreover, the remaining items on the navigation bar will also become more prominent in the eyes of the website visitors. And a short navigation also helps your page rank better by being more SEO-friendly.
No Navigation Bar in Some Pages
Have you created a proper navigation for your website? It might look perfect from the homepage. But is it available in the same manner from the other pages of the website? If not, you might lose your website visitors.
It is extremely important to have one primary navigation, which should be present in all the pages of the website. No matter in which page the visitor lands, she should be able to use the primary navigation bar to visit the most important pages of the website. This can be done by a sticky navigation and the bar should be present at the top of the pages.
Following a Haphazard Order
Are you following any order for the items that you are listing in the navigation bar of your website? It is important to arrange the names in the right order. And there’s a specific reason behind this. When a person is viewing a list, he pays maximum attention to the items listed at the beginning and at the end. Hence, it is always advisable to put the most important items of your menu at the beginning and end of the navigation bar. For example, you can start with the link for the Home page and end with a link that will drive the website visitors to the Contact page. Once you do that, you will surely find that the visits to these two pages have increased manifold.
Not Retaining the Important Terms
What terms are you using for the links on your website’s navigation bar? Using vague terms can often make the visitors confused. What are the sections that you search for in the very beginning when you reach a website? It’s usually the About Us or even the Contact Us. So do the others. Hence, it is always better not to play with those terms and ensure that they are present on the navigation bar for the website visitors to find and click them.
Navigation is one of the most important parts of a website. It can help the visitors to your website to explore it properly. And once they can do it, you can expect them to stay on your site for a longer time.
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