Navigating Your Way into Your Visitors` Hearts - Treat Your Visitors Well
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Breadcrumbs don’t work well for navigating through the woods, but they’re great for helping visitors pinpoint their location on a web site. In the real world we have signs and maps for that. Breadcrumbs should reflect the way your site is organized, and help show visitors what path they took to get to where they are. You can’t stay lost when you can always see where you are and where you’ve been.
You might think you’re being good to your visitors by providing them with lots of options – plenty of buttons to push to get to where they need to go. While options are usually a good thing, too many options can be overwhelming. Try not to include more than seven options in your primary navigation. If you need more than that, you may want to reconsider your site’s organization. Instead of creating separate full-fledged categories for “Pots and Pans,” “Small Appliances,” “Silverware” and “Dishes,” for example, you could lump all four under a larger category named “Kitchen.”
You can make very effective use of color changes as a visual cue to help your visitors. For example, on most web sites, when you’ve visited any particular page, the next time a link to that page shows up, it’s a different color. That signifies to the visitor that he or she has already seen that page. If you’re using tabs in your site’s navigation, you can set things up so that the tab (category) that a visitor is currently viewing is a different color, making it stand out from the others.
If this reminds you forcefully of the fact that the web is a VISUAL medium, let me add a word of caution before you get too artistically inspired. A beautiful web site is a fine thing – as long as it is readable. One blog listed among its “10 Commandments of Site Navigation” this one, which should go over the desk of web site designers everywhere: “Thou Shalt Not Use Fancy, Unreadable Fonts.” Graphics are a joy to behold – and they have no place whatsoever in site navigation.
If you still feel tempted to use graphics in your site navigation, remember that you have no control over what browser(s) your visitors will use to navigate their way to your site. If you don’t want to lose traffic, your site’s navigation must be usable by the lowest common denominator. If it isn't, remember that your competitors' sites are only a click or two away.
If that thought makes you balk, remember that search engine spiders will also stop by to index your site – and they can’t handle graphics. If you put graphics in your site’s navigation, you may be preventing the spiders from completely indexing your site – and thus sabotaging yourself when it comes to getting a good position on the search engine results pages.
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