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We see websites having up to five kinds of navigation:
- “Traditional” navigation, across the top of the page, or down the left hand side of the page
- Links on the page, within the text
- Search Boxes
- Breadcrumb trails
- Sitemaps
1. Traditional navigation is a double-edged sword. Your visitors are less likely to use it than they are to use links that are embedded in the page itself. (See more below.) On the other hand, if you don’t have on-page links (or have few of them), they’ll probably turn to your top- or left-nav bar to figure out where to go next.
Business-to-business sites (as a broad generalization) are particularly bad about their navigation because they try to use as few words as possible in the nav bar. (Sometimes we think they are all copying each other.) The picture below:
is a very typical business-to-business navigation bar, and you can see how the webmaster almost works to ensure you don’t know what the link means. Sure, if you do nothing but visit websites all day long, like our team does, you can guess what’s behind those links. But if the visitor has better things to do with his life than troll the Internet, he'll look at this and wonder:
- Which link tells me what this company does?
- Does “News” mean industry news or company news?
- Do I click on “Partners” to find a distributor, or is that where I learn which VCs invested in this company?
- Is “Support” the same as “Customer Support?”
- What are “Resources,” anyway?
Since "Solutions" is arguably the most important link in the navigation, why don't they change it to "How we help you" or "What we do?"
Links on the page, within the text. We’ve been doing a lot of user testing lately, and keep noticing how people use the links within the text (embedded like this: Contact us) to move around the site. It makes perfect sense – they are skimming and scanning, they find what they are looking for, and they click on it. Going to the navigation often requires more effort, because the user has to redirect his attention (and then once he does, it’s often hard to figure out what it means, as explained above.)
Having said that, creating links within the text is not always trivial. E-commerce sites do have a natural progression, from category page to product page to shopping cart. However, other kinds of sites – especially ten or twenty page b-to-b sites – don’t always have that luxury: Many pages may be dead ends: the company doesn’t have more to say (or more that it's allowed to say.)
Three ways that you can keep your visitors engaged with your pages without forcing them to use your “real” navigation are: 1) include white paper downloads on the page 2) embed into all pages a way to convert, even if conversion for you is just joining your email list 3) Give the customer an opportunity to progress to your “contact us” page.
Search Box. Everyone looks for information differently. The individual who uses your search box without even looking at your navigation or on-page links is like the person who walks into a shopping mall, ignores the store layout map, and asks someone around him, “How do I get to the store I’m looking for?” Some people just love the search box! And let's not forget the people who start with your on-page links or your "real" navigation. They may not find what they are looking for, and move to your search box – they’ve already encountered one level of disappointment, so here’s the place to delight them.
Make sure your search box works for your company. It should handle misspellings and plurals. It shouldn’t require special syntax or be case specific (UPPER vs. lower.) According to Hurol Inan, author of Search Analytics, “The root causes of search abandonment are that either no results were returned or the results were irrelevant.” Periodically, look at your searches – if one or two terms are searched on a lot, consider returning a landing page specific to that term instead of a traditional search listing.
Breadcrumb trails are the hyperlinks that are created at the top of the page when you visit at least two pages. Not all sites have them. Here you can see the breadcrumb trail from a Google AdWords campaign about a course in spraying technology:
Trails like these can be very helpful if you have a large site, but they aren't as trivial as they seem. Do you want the customer to have a trail of every page he has visited (which takes up lots of space, pushing your message further and further down the page) or do you want him to know where on the site he is? The first option is easy to implement but makes a mess of your page. The second option requires you to really think about your site layout. For example, a visitor may come in on the seach term, "Security Software," and land on a security software page, but someone can get to that page through your "Security" category or through your "software" category. Most sites have multiple ways to reach multiple pages -- how will you lay out the breadcrumbs? (Decisions, decisions.)
Sitemaps are where visitors turn when they are utterly lost. However, the sitemap visitor hasn’t given up hope (and exited – yet.) She needs to find her information desperately. Be sure that your sitemap isn’t static – each reference on the map should be a hyperlink back to the actual page, so that the visitor only needs to click. Sitemaps are the navigation of last resort, so keep them up to date and make sure that they are easy to understand.
Want to see our sitemap?
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