Now that you have outlined what you hope to accomplish with your site, it’s time to lay out the foundation for the content that you were going to include. So today, we are going to look at site navigation.

The goal is to present information in a way that helps to fulfill your site’s purpose.  Ultimately, you probably want people to either make a purchase or contact you.

First, some important facts:

• You have approximately three seconds to get your visitor’s attention. Think about how quickly you decide whether or not a site has the information you’re looking for. Site visits that last more than a few seconds average between two and three minutes per visit. Some will be longer, most will not.
• Eye-tracking studies indicate that visitors to you site will first look at the header, then the navigation bar, a bold headline, and the sidebar. Given that you have three seconds to grab their full attention, make the most of the most-viewed items.
• What appears “above the fold” matters. Just like on the front page of a newspaper where the area above the fold is what gets attention, the content on the first screen that people see – without scrolling – is important.
• Visitors are accustomed to finding certain basic elements in the navigation bar, which is best placed between the header and the content. They like to see a link to About Us, Contact, and Home. The word Testimonials garners attention as will Services, Portfolio, Products, and/or Blog. Too many links in the navigation bar can be confusing.
• Although visitors often look at the left side of the page, you are better off with content than navigation links on that side of the page.

Keeping all this in mind, you’ll want to decide on the main site sections and the navigation within those sections.

I always start by creating an imaginary navigation bar. Here’s an example:
Home  |  Services  |  Portfolio  |  About  |  Contact

Under “Services” you might have a drop-down list of the various services, and under “Portfolio” you could also have multiple choices. Each choice on a drop-down list can lead to a different page.

If you have any questions about setting up your site navigation, use the comment box below.

So to start, make a list of the main sections of your website and sublists of the pages within those sections. Always keep in mind that you want to accomplish your goal with as few clicks as possible, so don’t confuse visitors with too many pages