Make Your Site Easy To Navigate

Written by Jeff Colburn


Competition onrepparttar Internet is fierce. Just a mouse click away are hundreds of other sites offeringrepparttar 132626 same products/services that you offer. So when all your hard work has paid off and a potential client has found your site, you want to be sure they can easily find what they want so they can buy it from you. According torepparttar 132627 Giga research group, 70% of all web site visitors leave a site without finding what they came for. Imagine what will happen to your bottom line if 70% of all prospective clients can't find what they are looking for? You work hard to get people to your site, don't let poor website design make almost three quarters of them leave empty handed.

To make your site easy to navigate you need to lay it out logically. This will make your products and services easy to find. To start out with, group similar items together. Let's say you sell shirts, pants and coats. Group all of your coats together, then pants and then shirts. Don't list a few coats, then some pants, then a couple more coats, then some shirts. A person may go to your site looking for coats. They scroll downrepparttar 132628 page and see a couple of coats, then see some shirts and figure that those are allrepparttar 132629 coats you have. They didn't see what they wanted and left, but if they had scrolled down one more screen, they would have foundrepparttar 132630 exact coat they wanted.

A better solution is to list all of your coats, then cross sell. You could say, "If you need a shirt, use this link," then send them off to your shirt page. Or to be more specific, next to each coat (or shirt or pants) say, "Use this link to findrepparttar 132631 shirts and pants that go perfectly with this coat." You can haverepparttar 132632 link go to a page with shirts and pants whose style and color go with that coat. Not only will this let your prospective clients find all related products and make upselling easier, but if they don't know how to match colors or styles then you will put them at ease by makingrepparttar 132633 selections for them.

If you have products or services that can't be grouped together, or you just have a huge list of items, then use a search engine. Most webhosts offerrepparttar 132634 option of having a search engine on your site. This make finding things on large sites easier. Many people will use a search engine without even looking around a site to find what they want. They just find using a search engine to be faster and easier.

There are other ways to make your site easy to navigate. One is to have a site map. It can be as simple as a list of links to each one of your pages, or I have also seen them get more complicated, so that below each link to a page are allrepparttar 132635 main links on that page. Usingrepparttar 132636 clothing example above, you would have a link torepparttar 132637 coat page, then sublinks to wool coats, polyester coats and so on. I often use site maps to get around large sites, when they offer them. They are easy to put together and update and can be very useful if you don't want a search engine on your site or as another tool that visitors can use besides a search engine.

Your Website Survival Guide 2004

Written by Niall Roche


Inrepparttar big, wide online world there are millions of websites and billions of webpages. Inrepparttar 132624 increasing sprawl of this virtual jungle there must be an evolution. Some of these webpages must grow stronger and thrive whilst others will weaken and die.

There are 3 types of websites in this jungle. It's important that you ask yourself which category your website fits into. Your website survival may count on it.

The Poster Site A stunning work of art with intricate graphics that both amaze and dazzlerepparttar 132625 visitor. Poster sites are created by graphic designers for large companies or for use byrepparttar 132626 graphic design firms themselves. They're built to look good. Usability is not normally a factor nor are good search engine rankings. Looking good takes second place to being useful.

The poster site has its place inrepparttar 132627 virtual jungle for those companies who need to put a pretty "shop front" onrepparttar 132628 Internet e.g. grapic designers. Unfortunately many companies who hire someone to design their website normally winds up with a graphic artist who recently learned how to use Dreamweaver and is now a "website consultant". The end result is a stunning piece of artwork that is of little or no use torepparttar 132629 visitors or potential customers.

Poster sites arerepparttar 132630 supermodels ofrepparttar 132631 online world - they look great but aren't useful for anything other than looking great.

Pros Looks great A definite WOW factor for visitors

Cons Normally difficult to navigate Lousy rankings in search engines

The Content Site A site littered with valuable, useful information that visitors and search engines love. Content sites are normally run by hobbyists who have an all-consuming passion for a specific topic or subject. They write, collect and publish online massive amounts of information on one specific topic.

Content sites are also used by intelligent online marketers who have realizedrepparttar 132632 true value of providing useful content to visitors. This has lead to not all content sites being created equal with some lazy online marketers using spammy tools to create "dud" content.

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