What Pages and Navigation Should My Website Have?
A well-designed navigation menu is essential in creating a positive online experience for your customers.
By creating an organised and specific navigation menu, customers can easily find the information that they are looking for and it will increase the number of customers that will return to your website. If you are starting out with your first business website or want to make improvements to an existing one, please keep reading. So, what is it that a website navigation needs? There are many ways that you can present your navigation bar, but this must be refined to the purpose and function of your website and business. So, let’s get started.
What is a navigation menu?
A navigation menu is an organised and structured list of information that is linked to an internal page on your website. It is the index of your website, allowing visitors to access all of your site’s pages. It is essentially going to affect and reflect the success rate of your website by improving perception and allowing you to measure user flows.
You need to know about card sorting
Card sorting is the ultimate way to visualise the experience your website visitors will have. Having too many categories can be impractical and can confuse visitors. Information stored in the wrong category is what this experience will try to avoid as visitors will not find what they are looking for. To be able to card sort, all you need are index cards, sticky notes, and a pen. This process can also be done with various tools online and using apps. On the cards, write down a concept or topic. There will be two methods used to process this information.
Open Card Sorting
With an open card sorting session, you will invite colleagues/ users/ friends, and family to help sort your website topics into categories. Once this has been sorted, a name will be provided for each category that has been created.
Closed Card Sorting
In a closed card session, users will be given a pre-selected list of categories and they will sort the content on your website into these categories.
Tips for creating categories
Keep the categories simple
Do not use too many categories
Contact pages are essential and popular for modern website use
Research the categories used by competitors
So what pages do we recommend?
Home: This is your website's homepage which is like your shopfront. It gives visitors an immediate idea of what your company is and does. It is often used to promote the newest products, news, and company highlights. It should also easily direct visitors to the rest of your site with a clear menu button.
Products Categories: Each category for your product or aspect of your company should have a dedicated page that links to the individual items.
Contact: A contact page will provide all the information you want to give your visitors to contact your company.
In conclusion, all websites have different goals and purposes and there isn’t one template that will be useful for all websites. By conducting the correct and effective research, and attempting to understand the visitors' experience, you are on the right path to finding your website's suitable categories.