Tips On Effectively Organizing Your Navigation



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Not all links are created equal.

While all of your links may be important, you must sort and prioritize to come up with an effective navigation scheme. Here's what you should keep in mind:

1. Sort your links

Your links should be organized according to their relationship to each other. Any time you can find a way to divide your links into two or more categories, do so.

If you have more than 5 or 6 links, categorizing becomes very important. Try to find some natural groups. For example, suppose you sell widgets, and your site has this set of links:

  • Mini widgets

  • Multi-colored widgets

  • Discounted widgets

  • Contact us

  • About the company

  • News

Your major categories are:

  • Products

  • Company info

When you separate the two sets of links according to those major categories, it becomes much easier to sort the available information.

The simple reason is that a choice between two items is less complex than a choice between 6 items. It's the principle of dividing and conquering.

Take a look at the following site:

www.adobe.com

Notice the four main categories--Products, Resources, Support and Purchase. These four categories help visitors narrow down at a glance which area they need to look in to find the info they want.

Imagine if all of those links were lumped into one long list. How much harder would it be to figure out where to go?

Often, you might not have clear-cut categories. For example, you may have three links that all go together in one category (such as "Products"), plus several more miscellaneous links. Even if the miscellaneous links don't fit conveniently under one category name, you can still group your links. Put the three product links together, then all the miscellaneous links in a separate place.

2. Prioritize your links

Hopefully, you have some idea of what you want visitors to do on your site. Your site should be designed to drive a specific action--in other words, get visitors to do a specific thing.

Once you've decided what your primary goal is, your navigation should reflect it. The links that pertain most closely to your main goals should be emphasized the most. You need to guide the visitor in the direction you want him or her to go.

Prioritize. Ask yourself the question, "What is most important?" What do you really want to accomplish? (I'll give you a hint: "About the company" should not be a top priority link.)

Here are several examples of sites that prioritize well:

www.fleet.com

On the home page, you'll see three main links. These links are geared at attracting the company's major types of customers. All other links on the page are much smaller.

www.atomz.com

On this page, it's clear that the company wants visitors to click on one of their three product links: Publish, Search or Promote. The site does a good job of getting attention and guiding the visitor in a specific direction.

www.columbiahouse.com

Right from the beginning, it's obvious that the company wants visitors to join one of their three clubs. All other links are relegated to the bottom of the page.

By carefully prioritizing, these sites are able to narrow down the choices and make it more likely that visitors will head in the direction they want them to go.



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Okay, one of the reasons why posting has been light on this blog is because we have been busy. My wife and I have also had our first child (well, two years ago) and to be honest, our work has become less innovative in terms of doing cool new things and more iterative, as in we have been applying a lot of the cool things we learned and developed over the last few years.

This happened because we changed our business model from agency style to "plug us into your operations and we will be your dev crew" style.

Anyways, every once in a while we like to take stock and see where we may be able to gain some time so as to try and work in our next direction or new model, whatever that may be. The applications that we use are often places where we can find cool new stuff and gain time.

What things have you done to find extra time? Please, share below!

Here are three things that, in the last year point five have helped us find some extra time.

  1. Navicat: we moved all of the bits of PHPmyAdmin accesses over to navicat at about the end of 2007 and this was an excellent move. Tonnes of time gained.
  2. TeamViewer: for quick support and desktop sharing with remote staff.
  3. Buying a netbook and using Maxivista and Ultramon: adds two new monitors to my existing setup. I now have a 4 monitor two computer setup which allows me to not only have two more monitors but I can also have open two versions of many of the apps that I use (useful for multitasking with teams etc.)
  4. Moving simpler client sites to WordPress: now that it has one step upgrades and almost doesn't require the use of an FTP client to get up and running on some hosts.
  5. Dictation Software: I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for writing some course and blog materiel lately (pre-writing for my new blog). I find this is saving me a load of time and I am getting more written then ever before.

So what solution have you implemented lately to buy you some extra time?



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