Organized Site Navigation

Imagine a library with no catalog system. Who would go there to use it to find books? No one. The time it would take to track down a needed resource would be to great. The same applies to real estate agent web sites.

Navigation Priority

A web site is an information source. People use it to find houses or real estate articles or local facts and history. Too many web sites feature very poor navigation and users quickly become frustrated while digging for information. Try to use the home page to discribe the site. Use different types of navigation to guide users to hot information and bury more obscure, less useful info. Be careful not to feed them everything at once.

4 Key Navigation Methods

There are four types of navigation to use: main, secondary, contextual, sitemap.

The main navigation should be easy to find. It should be across the top or down the left side. Main links on sites with a few pages will take the user right to the article upon clicking. Sites with more articles may have to present another level (categories) where articles are posted. Don't make your users hunt for the main menu. It should be obvious where they can go look for information.

Secondary navigation might be a set of articles you want your users to read but that are secondary to the main navigation. Place them in a menu within an article or on the right hand side of the page. Sometimes these articles are related to the one they are reading.

Contextual navigation is when you link to another related page using words in the article content. Google loves this type of linking.

Every site needs a Sitemap. A sitemap is an organized set of links to most (every) page on the site. Users can browse through all of the articles without having to click through many pages. They can do a keyword search on just that page by using their browser's "find" tool.

Don't make your users hunt for information. Help them find what they need. Put less important information, like facts about your pet, in lower pages so they can find the meat that will motivate them to contact you. Teach your users that you are organized and try to capture them so they don't go looking at another site. Convert them with your great information.