Over many years that we have been on the web, we have gleaned useful models to structure a web site’s navigation. Here are a few insights on how to structure the navigation of a web site.

Modified Laundry List Linking
This is a very old way of presenting your web links. You would have no doubt seen this in may sites where the links start with About Us and ends with Contact Us.

Over the years, as the web has evolved, this basic Laundry List structure has been replaced by a number of variations. The best variation is when you put up those links which are more important [Primary Links] to your customers upfront. And those which are secondary, later.

How do you decide which are Primary Links and which ones are Secondary? It’s easy really. Those links which have a direct bearing on the customer choosing your services/ products are Primary.

About Us, unless you wish to be pompous, cannot and should not be a Primary Link. But Portfolio, Services, Products, Case Studies and Contact usually are.

McDargh Consulting uses a modified laundry list navigation.

Linking By Customer Segment Served
In the Dell site, we see another way to link the pages. This is
a) by products [obviously the latest]
b) by customer segment served [home business, small business, large business, etc].

For IBS, we have divided the main navigation into Services and Products. The other links are of secondary importance. The reason for doing this is that we believe customers come to your web site for solving their problem, not to find how great a company you are.

Visuals and text which address customer’s problem will always be of primary value to your customers.

Linking By Customer Behavior
Mandalay Bay understands its customers behavioral patterns well.

It has segmented its customers as The Connoisseur, The Escapist, The Player, The Party Goer and The Professional. On its Home Page, it offers Flash movies, which are customized for each type of user and how they can enjoy themselves at Mandalay Bay.

Note the Flash films contain sell, not fancily done, meaningless movement which says nothing about the product or service. No, not some self-indulgent logo trick.

This customer distinction, or classification, is over and above the standard menu at most Las Vegas Hotel properties.
If you look at the top navigation of this site, you will notice that it also addresses activities by type:

>> Entertainment

>> Conventions

>> Casino, etc

Linking by Exploding your Services
In Avendus, the Services menu has been exploded and given primary importance in the navigation scheme.

How do you Structure the Inside Pages?
Once you get past the Home Page, you still have to think of information structure for the inside pages.

For eg, in IBS, the top nav bar contains the primary links. Once you click on the Primary Links, the secondary links kick in on the left panel. The tertiary links are on-page. Usually, this is a very good way of presenting your links.

What’s more, on this site, when you drill down to a Service or Product, the landing page has information structured such that the customer need not press another link to view anything. The product features, benefits, case studies, contact information, contact form, download links, related links, etc are all there on the page itself.

Sites with e-commerce capability are the best exponents of everything being on page, or at hand, for the customer. You will find related items, people-who-bought-this-also-bought-this info, buy button, checkout button, quick cart feature, etc right on the page.

This is in stark contrast to many sites where a Service Description page has just that: Service Description. Interlinking pages with clearly spelt out Next Steps is important for directing customer behaviour.

Usually, it’s left to the prospect to divine the next steps. View the portfolio, see the Case Studies and sometimes correlate this with other pages/ sections, contact the vendor, subscribe to newsletter, login to download, etc, are all in separate links on the site and sometimes in different places. This makes it difficult for the prospect to take a logical path through the site.

In summary:

• When structuring the links on your site think beyond simple laundry lists
• Reduce the number of links by chunking it into tighter units
• Chunk secondary and tertiary links into separate regions and let them be distinguishable as such from their font size itself
• Focus on the links from a customer’s perspective [what’s more important to him/ her, than to you]
• See that your Home Page has information which changes from time to time [News, Careers Opportunities, Case Studies, Blog, etc - good for Google indexing and in all fairness to signal to the repeat visitor that things indeed have changed on your site]
• Minimize the amount of clicking that the customer has to do when he reaches the Product/ Service pages [link intelligently to try and accommodate all relevant information to which helps the customer take a decision in your favour]