Fixing Navigation Problems

Good morning, subscribers. Trying to rush my son off to
school so I can finish my taxes. Ugh. I hate this time of
year. Surely I am not the only one doing them late, filing
for an extension, and wondering how I will pay the taxman,
again, this year -- am I?

Last time we chatted about the biggest mistakes businesses
make with their web sites, we spoke about poor design and I
recommended some graphic tools to help you modify and
improve your own web sites.

Today I want to focus on poor navigation. A site must be
organized logically and intuitively to make it easy for
your visitors to find the information they are seeking and
to understand your value proposition.

So many sites bury critical information too many layers
deep. It's like drilling for oil. You go deeper and deeper
and still never strike black gold.

Many sites use only one form of navigation, or only place
navigation links or buttons at the top of the page. This
can be frustrating for sites with long pages. It means your
visitor has to scroll back up to the top to navigate to
another page. Place links minimally at top and bottom of page.

Many amateur web designers like to use Flash, Java and
JavaScript buttons to make their sites looks cool.
Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the smartest way to
do it. Search engines like to follow text links and these
other types of buttons may look good but are not search
engine friendly. So if you want to encourage the search
engine spiders to crawl and index your site contents, then
avoid these other types of buttons.

The best thing to do is to organize your content and use
text links. Make sure that the text links that navigate
your site content do not launch new browser windows when
launched. Nothing is worse then visiting a site that opens
a million windows. Only launch new windows when linking to
an external third-party site.

Lastly, always test your navigation links. When a visitor
hits a dead link or gets sent to an unexpected location,
all credibility goes in the toilet.

I wanted to show you a site we just launched for a client,
Heatwave Supply:

http://www.heatwavesupply.com

Their old site was made with FrontPage and consisted of a
static template with a little text. No pictures of product
or their showroom. No real separation between residential
and commercial products. No contact form. We've taken a
number of steps to improve the situation. This site has
additional product catalog features which they will enable
once they get some site traction. Let me know what you
think.

And here's a tool worth considering to help you with your
web design projects:

Design Dashboard
http://www.graphicsassistance.com/designdashboard.htm

This tools seems to resolve a lot of problems new web
designers have. Check it out.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Steven