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Series 3 of 3 – Simple tips to improve the design of your site: Menus + Links + Sitemap
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This is the last part of “Simple Tips To Improve Your Website“. As you have seen from the past two weeks, there are easy changes that can made to a website without having to rebuild it and that would increase its efficiency and conversion rate.

Today we are wrapping it up with Menus + Links + Sitemap.

=1= Navigational menus:

By menus we mean the navigational bar that most sites have at the top of every page. It is a way to direct visitors to a page of interest easily and quickly. Saying this, less is more when it comes to the titles in your nav bar. The tendency for website owners is to describe in several words each link. Internet users have become quite smart and if you write “About” instead of “About our company”, they will absolutely get that it links to your company’s profile page.

Minimizing the textual link in the menu makes the pages easier to read because it is less cramped, giving the page a more organized feel.

We also recommend no more than 4 links in the nav bar in addition to a link to your homepage on the left side and a link to your contact page on the right side (that makes it a total of 6 for those who are counting). The home and contact links are expected by Internet users at those locations and it will make it easy for them to get back to the homepage or reach your contact form. Organizing it differently means you are taking a risk of annoying users who cannot find your home or contact page.

Drop down menus are very convenient. There again make sure to keep the text succint and order each menu in order of their importance to you and/or your visitors.

Sometimes simply reorganizing your menus can make a huge difference on your website’s efficiency and success with its visitors.

=2= Linked text and images:

URL links can be in menus, inside paragraphs, buttons or on top of images.

If they are in the middle of your textual content, make sure they are clearly defined as being a link otherwise your visitor won’t know to click on the linked word or sentence. The old school underline still works to indicate the element linking to another page. You may also indicate by using specific text “Click here to review our testimonials” for instance. It is a bit dated but still works great.

If you are linking your images, you also need to make it clear to your website visitors. A simple way is to add a “click me” type icon as part of your image. You could also have a chain link icon appear upon mouse over; the chain icon has become the standard icon for links.

Another change that is very easy to make is to have all external links on your site open a new tab. For instance if you want to link to a vendor’s website, make sure the link does not take your visitor completely away from your site. Instead add what we call “target blank” and your webpage will stay open in one of the browser’s tabs. It is a simple change but very efficient to not loose your visitors.

=3= Website sitemap:

The word Sitemap can define two different types of sitemaps. One is invisible to your visitors (typically titled sitemap.xml) and its sole purpose is to help search engine bots better understand your web pages. The second one is the actual navigational layout of your site and the one we are discussing today. Some websites have a page which shows an actual sitemap in the form of a graph though this is a bit old school and truly most users are not visiting this page.

As you are trying to make small changes to your site to improve its effectiveness take a fresh new look at the overall sitemap of your site. Are the pages linking from one to another organically and easily or does your visitor have to continually go back to the homepage? Does the way you have organized the pages nurture your visitors to where they should be going next and want to be? These are all good question and again easy and affordable changes to make on your website.

If you are ready to have a discussion about making changes to your website that would fit your current budget and make your site last a few more years, contact us directly here.

You can watch our video below
 


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