Mar
28
SEO & Navigation
Filed Under Design General, Usability | Leave a Comment
A websites navigation is an important part of on site optimization. For SEO, any / all navigation should be coded as text, not images; these will become your most clicked on anchor text, and helps SE’s see what your categories are all about.
First, a few notes; avoid using AJAX, Javascript or Flash for your navigation. When you view the source of your page, you should see your links within the code – pulling that navigation (for example, with drop down navigation occasionally seen in e-commerce stores) from an outside file won’t help you.
For usability & SEO, do yourself a favor and put your navigation in the traditional places users would look – on the left or at the top. Google puts more weight on the content that appears at the top of a page, and the user is much more likely to stay on a page thats intuitive to navigate.
Please, at all costs, avoid Mystery Meat Navigation. Even worse, avoid not using any navigation and putting all your content on one page.
Now that you have your navigation designed, take a look at the site architecture and URL structure before coding.
Now that thats out of the way, Lets play “Guess where the navigation is?“
Mar
1
Usability & Design
Filed Under Usability | Leave a Comment
When designing your website, your first goal should be usability. Usability should take precedence over SEO and visual appeal. Without a user being able to use your website, both SEO and visual appeal are both pointless.
See example of poor usability on Seth Goden’s Blog: When you need to explain (”click on my head”) how to navigate, your site is not user-friendly.
Remember the primary goal of your website; if your goal is to achieve an end result, make it as easy as possible for the user to accomplish that goal.
10 Rules of usability:
· NO splash pages, unless they serve a legitimate purpose.
· Utilize proper site structure, with all pages accessible from a left or top navigation (Navigation should always be ‘above the fold’).
· Provide an HTML version of Flash sites.
· Make your navigation obvious; don’t make users ‘guess’ where to click.
· No page should leave a user ‘lost’, without full navigational abilities.
· Predictability is more important than prettiness.
· Use dark text on a light background in an easy-to-read font.
· Start content ‘above the fold’; headers shouldn’t take up more than 1/3 of the viewable page (without scrolling).
· Aim to be as accessible as possible.
For more on usability, visit the Software Usability Research Lab, or subscribe to this blog to read coming posts on usability.
