Please note this article was first published in 23 Oct 2009. Its content may now be out of date. We recommend taking a look at more recent website building blog posts or check out our comprehensive support pages. If you are looking for information on our 14 day free website builder trial we have a large number of webpages that guide you throug the process.
If you’ve ever been to a website and not known where to begin or how to find the information you need, you’ll know how frustrating and time consuming it can be. Websites can provide a vast amount of information but quite often visitors have a specific need and haven’t got time to scroll through pages and pages of text to find the answers they’re looking for. The structure of your website navigation, when you build a website is therefore vitally important to ensure that visitors can find what they need quickly and easily.
A website with little or no navigation is a website without structure and organisation. The primary navigation links for your site are of course your page buttons, which sit either down the left hand side or along the top of every page on your site. But what happens once visitors have clicked through to one of your pages? How do they find their way from there? It’s a good idea to provide access to the rest of your pages from anywhere on your website. In an ideal website, visitors should be able to get to any page in just a couple of clicks, with your main pages being just one click away.
One way of doing this is to include a “Back to Home” link a the bottom of every page so visitors can get back to the start and choose another page very quickly. If you have pages with lots of information on them requiring a lot of scrolling to reach the bottom, this will save visitors from having to scroll all the way back up to choose where to go next. To place a Back Home link:
Go to your control panel and click the edit button next to your 2nd primary page – this may well be your “About us” page. Next, scroll to the bottom of the page and tab down to a new clear line or paragraph. Enter the text “Back to Home” at the bottom. Highlight this text, then click the Yellow Insert Link icon in your editor bar > Webpage > Internal Webpage > Webpage > and select your home page from the drop down menu – it’s usually right at the top so you should just be able to click Add to Website. Now Save your page
Now, while you are looking at the page in live view (as opposed to the editor view), scroll down to your new link text, highlight it with your mouse and copy it by either right click > copy or press Ctrl + “C” on your keyboard. By copying it in live view, you will be copying the link as well. Now you can simply paste this hyper linked text onto all the other pages on your site. Open each page in the editor, scroll to the bottom and in a new line or paragraph, either right click > paste or press Ctrl + “V” on your keyboard. Save the page and test your link.
You may well have seen other websites providing a row of these quick links at the bottom of their pages, all with the main aim of improving navigation. The text for the links are often quite small so as not to detract from the main content, and is now an easily recognised and well-known design feature on websites, so your visitors shouldn’t miss them. Most common quick page links include: Home, About Us, Terms and Conditions, News, Forum, Privacy Policy, Help, Delivery / Postage Info, Contact Us, Email.
When you create these links, make sure that you highlight each word or term cleanly and avoid highlighting characte
r spaces either side of the word along with it. When you’re creating links which will sit right next to each other in small text you need to keep them within the boundaries of their respective words so they don’t conflict with each other, causing visitors to click the wrong one, so keep them clean and tight. A good tip would be to separate each link with a small vertical line or “pipe” as its called, which you will find on your keyboard.
The content of these pages, while still important is not considered as Primary Information, i.e. it isn’t information, which will actively provoke direct response or purchase from customers and so can quite happily go at the bottom of each page. It also successfully leaves the spotlight and main stage area for the stars of the show - the products and services you are selling.
Please remember, this article was first published 23/10/2009. The content may be out of date and you cannot post comments any more. Please check out our new blog.
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