Are you making these website navigation mistakes?
The biggest website mistake I see people make is in their navigation. This is such an important part of your website. People will normally scroll through your site and then up to your navigation. If they can’t find what they are looking for you might lose them.
Limit it to max 7 pages. Why not more? If you have too many options they don’t know which one to pick. People normally want to find about, services/work with me, portfolio, shop, and contact.
Keeping the wording short. Too long page names can look cluttered. So keep it short and sweet. No need to complicate, but make sure people want to click on it and don’t get too creative so people don’t understand.
Create sub-navigation. This is when you hover over a page in the navigation and you see more pages.
Use your footer! Your footer is the perfect spot to have FAQ, shipping, T&C, privacy policy, any other extra pages that might not be as important as others. If somebody can’t find what they need in your navigation they will scroll down!
When setting up your website have a plan. Write down the pages you need and then write the extra pages you want in your sub-nav or footer. Don’t add pages just because others do, make sure it’s useful to your audience and what they need.
Hamburger icon (which is the navigation menu icon you often see on mobile) are beautiful, but depending on your target audience, these can easily be overlooked. It’s trendy to have a cool navigation, but if people can’t find it then it’s more important to stick to the traditional menu.
Always make sure your logo links to your home page. To keep or to remove your home page in the navigation. Most websites now you can click on the logo and that will get you to the home page. But again this will depend on your target market, some will not realise this and find it hard going back.
Make sure your pages are in a prioritise order and that it will take people through a journey. They start with HOME > then want to find ABOUT the company > they then want to see the shop/your work/your services > then they might see if you know what you are talking about through the BLOG > and they will want to contact you.
If you have a lot of content, then add a search bar in your header. This will make it easy for your audience to find a product or a blog post.
Create an effect on which page people are on. The page might get highlighted in a different colour, have an underline, or be faded out.
