How Customer-Focused is Your Website?

Anyone who visits your website for the first time wants to have a reason to return. Navigation is a key component that directly impacts you from a business and marketing perspective. After all, navigation is often what stands between the user and the user’s goal. Hence, as a website owner, you should want to make that distance as short as possible

 That's why you need to ensure your website navigation offers a positive experience from a usability perspective, in other words, designing your navigation in a way that makes sense to website users. Don’t make your visitors do a lot of work to reach their goal - if the user's goal is to locate your contact page, for instance, help them get to it fast.

Navigation of information, as discussed in Alan Cooper’s book, “About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design”, can be accomplished by three key methods: scrolling (panning), linking (jumping), and zooming. In order to develop a solid navigation system, designers need to enable the user to move smoothly from one place to another, and promote flow.

It makes a lot of sense to hold a survey on your website using your readers in order to always be in tune with what they want. Running a website is a 50-50 affair – you give in to certain things in order to keep your readers and traffic growing. Readers do not care about how much you are investing to keep your website going, it just has to satisfy their needs.

Personally, I think every serious business website needs to undergo vigorous restructuring at least once a year after readers’ review. If it becomes necessary for you to redesign to draw a lot of attention from your audience, go ahead and do so. Giving your website a new touch with an objective of making the different pages look like a micro site within the general site itself helps give those other pages prominence as well as constituency.

Specifically, the navigation should enable users to choose from a small selection of pages to visit.

Provide clear labels for the pages where navigation tabs take you and adapt your website to match user needs. Tell people where they currently are and how to get back and provide a search function.

Components of a Navigational System: In order to achieve the above-mentioned goals, a well-designed navigational system should include some components:

Current Locator: This is also known as a site ID and is a way for users to know where on the website they currently are. For instance, when you select a given tab in the website navigation, does the appearance of that tab change to reflect that it has been selected? For instance, on Goal.com website, when a user selects a tab, it becomes darker than the rest of the navigation.

Navigation method: For visitors, this is a way to find out where on a website you can go -- and how to get there. It gives you access to the primary content sections and utilities, then places you can get to that aren't part of the primary content hierarchy.

A user friendly website should have a search function: This is the search functionality visitors have access to. It's a way to quickly find specific information they might be looking for, and is often illustrated by the magnifying glass icon.

Many of the best websites include a lot of images and photos, and many use large photos in the background or a featured area. News websites obviously include a lot of smaller photos to accompany current stories, but corporate websites and sports apparel websites in particular often rely on large photos as a prominent part of their design.

Have a news area: Even websites that aren’t news-focused, such as corporate and league websites and those of individuals, typically contain recent news items on the home page. News and blog sections provide an opportunity for easy communication with few barriers.

These are the key elements or requirement needed, if you want your website to stand out and generate enough traffic. As you incorporate these components into your website navigation, ensure that you keep their look and feel consistent. Providing consistent design throughout your website allows users to feel confident that they know where they are and that they can find what they’re looking for.