How to structure and organize your website navigation

When it comes to designing and building a website there are many important things you need to consider when it comes creating something useful for your visitors. Above all else, “content is king” is a phrase that continues to ring true no matter what. If you aren’t providing useful content, what purpose do your customers have to come to your website?

With that being said, providing the best content is not helpful if you don’t organize it in such a way that your visitors can actually find it! Therefore, it’s really important that you invest time and thought into mapping out what pages you want to create, and how you want users to access them in your website navigation.

Common mistakes people make

Too Many Pages

The more pages you have, the more clicks you expect of your users to navigate through your content. It also presents challenges with how you organize your pages.

Too Few Pages

I know, kind of a contradiction of the last point, right? If you have too few pages, you end up cramming more content on fewer pages. Doing this forces a user to sift through to find the information important to them. At this point, you are encouraging them to seek their information elsewhere.

Bloated Top-level Navigation

When we say top-level navigation, we are referring to the navigation links a user can see at first glance when they visit your website. The more links you have in this space the harder it is for users to find what they are looking for. It also presents challenges when users on smaller screen sizes (such as tablets) stop by.

Multi-level Dropdown Navigation

A dropdown navigation is a box that appears when you hover over your top-level navigation item. It shows sub-pages that are nested under a specific category. While one level of sub-navigation is not only acceptable but very standard, adding another level of sub-navigation items should be avoided for usability reasons.

Tips for designing your navigation

While there is no minimum or maximum for top level navigation items, if you have more than 7 top level nav items, especially with a horizontal navigation, it is starting to get a bit busy.

Avoid extremely lengthy page/navigation names

Your site should be responsive (read a previous article for just some of the reasons) and when you are on a mobile device, your navigation should collapse into a hidden hamburger menu to make it easy for users to use your website.

There is a lot to think about when it comes to structuring your website navigation. If you need a professional opinion on your plan or help to build your website, please let us know. We have the industry experience to help you make the right choices for your website. Call us 1-800-232-3989, email us at contact@pspinc.com, or visit us at PSPinc.com.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

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Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

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