Site navigation

Poor navigation is one of the major reasons that visitors leave sites and pages don’t get indexed.

How many times have you been on a website and not been able to find pages that you thought should be obvious? Websites by their very nature are a collection of pages linked together by a navigation system and when that system is poorly designed, it’s much like a road system with poor signs and unexpected turns – the visitor (or driver) ends up in the wrong place, misses their turn and gets frustrated. Web usability author Steve Krug puts it elegantly in his book titled Don’t Make Me Think when he observes that poor navigation makes us stop and think, whereas well designed navigation is almost invisible.

Examples of poor navigation are not hard to find, and while it’s relatively rare to see bad navigation built to a brand new site, it seems to develop and deteriorate as more content and pages are added without any thought to the overall page-to-page linking. Frustration is a major reason why users give up on websites, so it’s essential to maintain obvious navigation even as your site gets larger.

Website owners often imagine that everyone will be coming in through the front door – otherwise known as the home page (e.g. http://mysite.com) – but site statistics tend to prove otherwise. While the bulk of your traffic will point to the top-level domain when the site is first launched, as you gather more inbound links and increase your online reputation, a growing percentage of hits will be targeted to individual pages nested in your site.

In the book, we cover how visitors find your site, and features of both good and bad navigation.

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