The navigation menu is the most important design element of your website. A badly designed navigation bar can easily drive users away. So, simply follow these simple tips to re-design and re-think your navigation.
Design a simple navigation menu
Your navigation menu is like a compass: your potential customer needs it to find relevant content. A simple mistake, and you’ll drive the user away.
Do like Apple – keep it simple. Web Designers recommend a maximum of 8 link buttons – the more options you give, the easier it is for the user to get lost. Also, make use of short, descriptive and internationally comprehensible text: use “about us” instead of “company details”. Another suggestion is to place your main navigation at the top of your website: that is the most natural, most visible and more user-friendly position.
Customise your navigation menu
You should know by now that driving users away from your website is much easier than attracting more traffic. SEO and Google AdWords will boost your website visits, but a poor navigation menu could make you waste all the time and money you spent!
Do like Dell – design your navigation menu with your audience in mind. If you sell to different groups, for example Residential and Commercial, your navigation menu needs to drive the right audience to the right section of your website.
Be smart with your navigation menu
As we already said, the navigation menu is the most important element of your website. So, be smart and make it user-friendly, search-friendly and sales-friendly!
Do like Ferrari – highlight the most important sales page. So, choose your high converting sales page (e.g. online shop, newsletter page, products page, contact page) and make that link prominent. Apply a different style, colour or add a little icon and users will be more likely to visit that page.