The average attention span seems to be getting shorter and shorter. If people don’t get what they are looking for very quickly they are apt to go some where else. This appears to be happening in several areas of society. Television shows aren’t as slow moving as they were 20 years ago. Just watch some old TV sitcom to see the difference. TV shows now move exceptionally fast. Dialogue is fast. Camera angles move quickly. This is partly because people get bored quicker and TV producers know that their show is just a click away to another show. The same can be said for a web site. If a person goes to a web site and cannot find what they are looking for quickly, they are just a click away to another web site. That is why it is very important that your web site looks very professional and easy to navigate.
How do you make sure that your site is easy to navigate? This is fairly straight forward if you have a small web site, say, around ten pages. The web site designer would have done a very poor job if you got lost on a ten page site (although we have seen a fair amount of these over the years). It becomes more difficult to navigate a medium to large site, usually ones that are 20 or more pages. In order to make larger sites easy to navigate it is important to prelan the site with an outline. By creating an outline of your site you can previsualize the site’s structure. This outline can also server as your site’s site map. Here is an example of an outline:
- Home
- Products
- About Us
- Contact Us
This outline can be further broken down to accommodate the other pages of your site into sub categories:
- Home
- Products
- About Us
- Company History
- Press Releases
- Contact Us
The outline can be broken down even further into sub-sub categories:
Once you have developed the outline as much as you can forsee you then have to think how this will be used on your site. You can’t have your outline shown on every page of your site. So, how do you implement this online? There are several different ways. Once way is by having drop down navigation. This is where Javascript or DHTML is used to create a “Fly Out” or “Fly Down” menu. You mouse over a main category and then the sub-categories appear underneath. This can be broken down further into sub-sub categories. Another method is creating “Breadcrumbs”. This shows you the parth of navigation you have taken, making it easier to find where you are. Ex:
Home >> Products >> Pens >> Plastic
These links make it easy to go back and forth. Breadcrumbs are usually placed on the top of the web page.
For very large site of hundreds of page it isn’t practical to have large drop down menus or large breadcrumb trails. At this point it is important to have other ways of finding content. Adding a search form on a very large site is effective.
In the end it is very important that once someone gets onto your site that they don’t get lost or frustrated trying to find what they are looking for. All web site users are just a click away to a competitor’s site. Having an easy to follow navigation structure helps keep them there.
