An often overlooked but crucially important element of any website design is it’s navigation or menu structure. The golden rule gleaned from research into browsing habits is that people have a 3 second attention span when viewing a website and/or page on a website and that if they can’t find what they’re looking for within 3 clicks of the mouse at the maximum, then they will leave the website.

The upshot of these two pieces of information is that if someone arrives at your website and can’t see the information they require within 3 seconds of their arrival, or have to navigate an unfathomably layered site navigation structure taking them beyond 3 clicks before reaching the desired information, then they will trot off to the nearest search engine to find another provider. Of course, if you operate a website you don’t necessarily know the extent of this issue and may feel that your website is very user-friendly however, bear in mind that you will be familiar with your site and what you feel is a sensible and transparent way of structuring the information you wish to present throughout the website may not be commensurate with the view of potential customers. This is a common issue and concessions really need to be made to a professional website designer who will be aware of research and common practice and should be able to structure a website that satisfies the various criteria or creating a user-friendly website.

A common means for gauging whether or not your site is structured in such a way as to allow ease of navigation for a viewer is to have a statistical analysis tool installed on the website – such as Google Analytics – as this will show you the page at which people arrived at your website, how long they stayed on that page and where they went to next. If, for example, the majority of people arrive at your site at a particular page, stay on it for 4-5 seconds and then leave for another site then your website really isn’t grabbing their attention and showing them the information they require. This is called the bounce rate (ie people arrive at a website page and bounce straight off the website again) and the higher it is, the more of a problem you have with your website!

Of course, it’s not simple a case of having to have all your information displayed on the home page of the website. What all websites should have is a transparent navigation/menu structure where each tab/link is named something logical pertinent to the page on the website to which it navigates. Thus, someone viewing this website that requires web design can clearly see the navigation tab at the top of the page for web design and go straight to the relevant section.

If your website, and/or business, offers a wide array of services or products, then of course it is not possible to have a specific menu tab/link to each individual product and/or service on display on each page but it is still essential that a viewer should be able to navigate to any page of the website from any other page without frantically using the browser’s back button, for example. Therefore, a structured menu with sub-navigation elements should be used. For example, if your business sold clothing then the menu would be huge if a tab/link to each item of clothing was presented on each page and so the menu would list categories (trouser, shorts, coats, for example) that would contain sub-categories to allow a viewer to ‘drill-down’ to the precise item they required in a logical manner.