Work At Home: Your Website Navigation is a Crucial Blueprint
If you work at home, your website is the equivalent to a store of a traditional brick and mortar business owner. When you visit a large department store, one of the biggest time savers and factors which allow us to avert frustration is the fact that it is easy to find what we are looking for. This also needs to be the case for your website. Thus, the focus of this article is to provide you with everything you need to know about setting up your work at home website so that your visitors can find what they are looking for quickly.
The blueprint to your website is its navigation scheme. The navigation scheme which you set up for your website acts as its road map. Therefore, it must be clear, structured, and intuitive. No matter how good a website looks, or how much useful information it possesses, if it does not have intuitive navigation, your visitors will not be able to find what they are looking for, and will become frustrated and leave your website. Just look at the large department store example. If a person has to look hard to find what they are looking for, they will go somewhere else.
Your website's navigation must immediately tell the visitor:
- Where they are.
- What is there.
- Where they can go next.
There are many ways of presenting navigation. You can place it down one side of the screen, along both the top and bottom, or in a frame. However, one thing that you should keep in mind when setting up navigation in addition to your visitors, are the search engines. Search engine listings are important to those of us who work at home. Most search engines do not like frames and java script because they cannot read them. Since the search engines need to read the links in order to index your website properly, frames and java script are not a good idea. Furthermore, some of your visitors will have it disabled.
Below, I have outlined what I believe are some things that every work at home website should take into account.
1. It is important to allow instant access to the rest of your site from anywhere within it. Ideally, you should be able to go to any page in a maximum of two clicks. If you can make it one click, that is even better.
2. Use the same navigation, scheme, and elements on all pages. Create a common navigational look to ensure that your users can use your site navigation effectively.
3. Wherever possible, use text navigation. Research also shows that "breadcrumb trails" positioned under the page title (at eye level and closer to other links on the page) are used more than breadcrumb trails positioned at the top of the page.
4. Keep navigation lists in close proximity. This will help your users to develop a mental model of your website.
5. Use the right margin for your web site's main index. Research has shown that users have a greater propensity to click on topics in the right margin than those placed on the left because they are located much closer to the scroll bar.
6. Separate important items, from guidance links. Guidance links are the things people may need to find from any page, but do not need to be prominent. For instance, Privacy Policy, About Us, Site Map, FAQs and Terms of Service can appear in the footer of the page.
There you have it. Us work at home folks need to look out for one another. I hope that you take heed to my advice.
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