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Step 8: Understand the importance of navigation labels
Labelling and sorting your navigation system is an important decision that can have ongoing positive or negative repercussions. A number of sites make a lot of standard mistakes and the most common one is assuming that people know what the product, services or site is about.
Navigation mistake #1: Generic labels
There is no point labelling a navigation item with a generic label such as 'Quote'. Labels should be more descriptive and include the topic such as 'Carpet Cleaning Quote'.
It can be difficult to keep the label sizes concise; however it is well worth working towards finding an appropriate keyword rich solution for your products and services.
Navigation mistake #2: Meaningless names
What is the point of using product names that have no naming relevance to the type of product?
Customers are highly unlikely to know or care about the names of all the products you have.
Unfortunately, many corporate sites were designed by people too close to the company's day-to-day way of speaking. There's no use labelling a page with the non-descriptive name of a product such as 'Easy Start'. If you're selling an 'Easy Start Home Loan' call it that!
Using keyword-rich phrases in your navigation that effectively represent your services and products ensures that the search engine spiders can easily determine what the content of your site is about.
Step 9: Develop a marketing plan
Building a site is only part of the process to establish a presence online. You need to carefully plan how you intend to get visitors to your website.
Will you:
- Rely on natural search engine indexation?
- Run a paid search campaign?
- Rely on other forms of advertising?
If you are counting on getting traffic through natural search engine optimisation you will need to carefully plan your architecture and include relevant keywords.
Be aware that new sites can take up to six months to get rankings in search engine indexes, so have realistic expectations.
Step 10: Start building the website architecture
Once you have carefully worked through the planning steps you should have a good understanding of what your site needs to meet your business objectives and your target audience requirements.
The next step is to map out your plan.
Depending on your business objectives and budget there are several different options and approaches.
Small investment:
If you have a small budget then you may wish to develop the architecture yourself or work with the person who will be writing the content.
Medium investment:
Prepare a creative brief for your web design agency that includes information architecture as part of your web project solution.
Large investment:
Where information architecture and usability are core to the business model and return on investment, then the services of specialist consulting firms should be engaged.
Master class: Plan your own architecture
If you are going to plan your own site do some research on the different types of site structures and find the one that will suit you. It's important you understand the different relevance of hierarchy.
The general rule is to place the most important information at the top of the hierarchy and therefore at the top of navigation systems.
Where information has the same value then other methods such as search tools and browsing may be incorporated. Remember search engines index pages as individual pages, so people may enter your site at pages further down in the hierarchy.