Here are the top five items I think are super crucial to a website menu or navigation that’s going to be effective in getting people to where they want to go. Now, when you’re laying out the menu or navigation structure for your website, you want to make sure you understand and are aware of the goal, right? And it’s to get the people that are coming to your website to where they want to get to as quickly as possible without frustrating them so that they leave your site and go somewhere else.
So let’s get started.
Keep it simple
You want to keep it to seven items or less since most people are only able to keep track of seven items before getting overwhelmed.
Keep it conventional
Now this is where you don’t want to reinvent the wheel and start doing some, you know, wacky stuff, like merry-go-rounds or spinning things. Keep it to the standards, keep it to what people expect. You want it to be as intuitive as possible so people can use it without thinking twice.
Keep it legible
That means to be aware of the fonts that you’re choosing and be aware of the color scheme that you’re using and make sure it’s all very easy to read. So this is where you get to fight the battle between the artistic side of you and the functional side; and the functional side, has to win this battle.
Responsive
Now this is probably the biggest faux-pas I see is when I pull up a website on a mobile device. The menu looks terrible, items are overflowing, submenus don’t appear. So make sure that you test your website navigation, the website menu on mobile devices to make sure it runs very smoothly and as people expect it to run.
Ordering the menu items
Now if you’ve got six or seven items laid out across the menu, make sure you’ve got the important items on the edges because the stuff in the middle can sometimes get lost.
There You Have It
So those were your five tips to make sure your website menus are doing their jobs-getting people to where they want to go. I hope you found this useful. Now go back to your site, take a look at your menu, and if you’ve got any questions, feel free to drop a comment below. I’d love to chat.
