When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally and serves its purpose. Here are the third and forth of ten important rules of thumb to make sure your website performs well.
Have a simple and clear navigation
Provide simple and straightforward navigation menus so that even a young child will know how to get round your site. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop down menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
If you have a multiple page site, a navigation menu at the side is the most common way of achieving this. Research has shown that having the navigation menu to the left of the screen is easier to use than having it on the right.
If you have a single page “mini site”, you still need to make it easy for visitors to find your Terms and Conditions or Contact Us pages. A navigation bar at the top of the page, or (more commonly) several lines of links at the bottom of the page, can accomplish this task quite easily.
Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at any given moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily.
If you have a side navigation menu, you can make the link to the page the visitor is already on a different color, or align it differently from all the rest. If you're using symbols to mark each page, use a different symbol for the page being visited. Some web design software: Net Objects Fusion, for example, will do this automatically for you.
Each page on your site should also have a title relevant to its contents. For every page other than the sales page, having a headline that tells visitors what page they're on is also a good idea.
Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
