Structure: The Single Most Important Part of Your Website
The Four Things You Should Keep in
Mind When Designing Your Site
Having a website is an essential part of promoting your products or services, but what does it mean to have a truly great website?
It all comes down to structure.
A well-structured, easy to navigate website is key. Without a logical structure that makes sense to your visitors, they’ll get confused and stumble when trying to find the information they need.
Your site structure should be simple enough for anyone to understand and follow, with links that are clearly labelled and organised. Most importantly, it should be consistent throughout the site.
Visitors often judge a website immediately by its appearance and how easy it is to use, so it is important to make a good first impression. The layout should be attractive and user-friendly, with clear navigation menus and concise text.
Here are some of the things you should consider when designing (or redesigning!) your website.
Top level navigation
When it comes to website design and structure, the top-level navigation is arguably the most important aspect to consider. Not only because it allows visitors to find the information they're looking for and navigate your site with ease, but its often the very first thing they look for when they visit.
There are a few key things to keep in mind when designing your top-level navigation:
Keep it simple - Don't overwhelm users with too many options or links. Only include the most important categories and sub-categories on your main navigation bar.
Make it easy to use - Place links in an easily accessible location and use clear, concise labels that accurately describe the page's content.
Use visual cues - If possible, use icons or graphics to help users identify different categories and sub-categories.
Get another opinion - Often while your navigation might make perfect sense to you, remember that you're not the person it's intended for.
If it looks wrong, it probably is - Sometimes you just know that it isn't working. Go with your gut and change it up if you need.
Giving your visitors a simple, but effective top-level navigation should be your first—and most important—goal.
Secondary navigation
Your websites secondary navigation should be organized in a way that makes sense for your site's content. Secondary navigation can and should include things like additional links, search tools, and other helpful site features.
When creating your secondary navigation, you'll need to decide which features are most important to your users. Category links are a great way to help users find information quickly and easily, while search boxes or other tools can help them laser-focus and find the specific content on your site they are looking for.
Other helpful features might include contact information, legal statements, or links to popular pages.
Page titles and meta data
When creating a website, it is important to structure it in such a way that both human visitors and search engines can easily find information that's relevant to your offerings.
Page titles are the text that appears in the tab of your web browser, and they should be descriptive and concise. You only have so much real estate in a person's browser, so keep your page titles short, to the point, and focused on what they'll find.
Meta data is information about a web page that is not visible to users, but is used by search engines to help rank pages and should include a brief description of the page, the content a visitor or search engine would expect to find, as well as keywords and phrases that are present in your content.
Images, video and other media
When it comes to including images, video and other rich media you can add to your website it's critical that you know how to ensure both visibility and accessibility.
Here is where the humble 'alt tag' becomes incredibly important.
Alt Tags or alternative text, is a piece of text that is used to describe an image. This text is read aloud by screen readers for the visually impaired, and it also appears when an image is missing.
It's important to use accurate and descriptive alt tags for all of your images, as they can help improve the accessibility of your website.
Alt tags are also powerful places to include additional information on your website such as keywords, key phrases, and other words which relate to the image you've uploaded.
Just don't go too nuts when creating them, around 125 characters is the ideal length for any alt tag.
Unfortunately, for other media like audio or video there isn't an easy to use feature like alt tags, but you can still ensure that the filenames of the media you want to include (yes, even images) are titled well, and provide a clean description of the media.
Whatever you do, don't name your latest masterpiece something like FINAL-1765BF-EXPORT.mp4.
That doesn’t help anyone.
Feeling a little lost? Don’t worry, I’m here to help
It’s understandable that when you’re putting together your website that you’re excited to get something out into the world.
This usually means two things:
You’ve probably just pushed the publish button and given yourself a round of celebratory high-fives a little too early.
The thing that took a hundred-and-eleventy-one hours of your time to finish immediately starts to look a bit odd, and you want to tear it all down and start again.
Don’t fret though, bask in the warm glow of achievement a little longer, then when the doubts start to creep back in head over to the Website Copywriting page and check out my Website Audit service.
With a quick, easy to understand audit you’ll be soon on your way to understanding what’s lacking on your site, how to better structure it for visitor experience, and how to tune your content for better search engine performance!
