Good navigation is critical for three reasons.  First and foremost so your visitors can find what they want.  Second, so search engines can find and organize your information in their indexes.  Lastly so you know where to put new information easily and quickly.  The key to success with your navigation is your ability to categorize and organize your information into sections that make sense and then your ability to add both information and new categorizations over time with minimal effort on your part.

1.  Does your navigation scheme make sense to someone that knows nothing about your company or products?

If you are a paint company and your navigation scheme looks like a color wheel this might seem cute and fun, but is impractical and probably doesn’t make sense to many of your non-professional painters.  Try http://www.bow-wowbooks.com/.  While this site has any number of other issues, its complete lack of navigation makes it impossible for visitors to get to what they need.  This is the opposite of what you should be trying to do.  Your goal is to get people to the content they want as fast as possible.

2.  How many clicks does it take you to get from the homepage to critical information?

You may have heard of the “Three Click Rule” in which users should be able to retrieve their desired information within three clicks.  On small sites this may be true, but the underlying concept of taking time to consider critical paths is really what this is all about.  A well constructed navigation and well organized and commented content allows for this.  This also means that you should always be thinking about what “critical information” is to your visitors.  This information might change and if it does, you should be aware of this and adapt.  If you don’t know what visitors are looking for, or haven’t even tried to get to it yourself then it’s going to be hard to make these determinations.  Sit down at your own website and pretend to be a customer and find the information, or have someone that isn’t intimately familiar with your business do this and observe them.  If you, or they are getting frustrated or lost then so are your customers and guess what, they're going elsewhere.

3.  Do you have to manually update HTML or other code in order to add a menu item?

Having to manually update code to add pages or menu items is extremely error prone.  You don’t want visitors browsing to broken pages.  In addition to being error prone, having to manually update code to add pages is time consuming and unless your HTML is properly formatted, might also make your site very non-search engine friendly.

4.  Do you have any broken links, or Under Construction pages on your site?

Broken links are like having a door in a store that leads into a brick wall.  It doesn’t take walking face-first into one very many times before customers go elsewhere.   Having "Under Construction" is as bad, or worse.  If your content isn’t available, then it isn’t available. Either write the content and post it, or don't put up links until you do have the content.  Imagine going to CNN's website to look for an article only to find out that the only part that was written was the title and the rest of it is "coming soon."  You wouldn't go back.  Your visitors are no different.

5.  Did you perform any usability testing on your navigation scheme before launching your site?

This might sound daunting, but it isn’t.  Grab a couple friends, family members, co-workers and have them each attempt to do the same task.  Observe them and see how they accomplish it and then ask them to comment.  Such tasks might be “locate product X” or “submit a request for service Y” or “purchase twenty widgets.”  Ideally you do this before launching your site the first time, but if your site is already live then still have them do it.  After these tasks are done ask them not only how easy or difficult was it to do, but how they feel about it.  What you find might be eye-opening.  Not everyone looks for information the same way and people react differently  to any difficulties they have trying to do these tasks.  Your goal is to make your site easy to navigate and use for everyone, not just you.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Technical Attributes

Before we start

Our goal here is to help you think critically about your website and quite possibly think about your site in ways you never imagined. We will discuss such topics as SEF, SEO, analytics, information architecture and more, but none of these technologies or techniques matters if the average user (you) navigates to a website and your first gut reaction about the site is negative. So, the first step will be for you to open a new browser window, clear the cache (this is important) and enter the address for your company. After exactly five seconds have passed, close the window and record a number on a scale from one to ten regarding your overall impression of your website. Ten being the best site you’ve ever seen and one being the World’s Worst Website. This is also a good exercise to do with a neutral third party.

Your Score ______

Step 1: The Evaluation

I will suggest going through this process with someone else’s website first. You don’t have to write does your answers, but just read through this list while examining someone else’s site. This will get you thinking critically about design and data. We’ll get to yours soon enough. This is by no means a totally comprehensive list of questions you should be asking, but just some to get you headed in the right direction and to figure out if your site needs help, or if things are just fine.

In our next post we will begin to examine each of these topics and the importance of each relating to your website.

Design

1. It is immediately apparent to a casual visitor what your company does (have a non-employee do this)?
2. Does your logo look professionally made? Be honest.
3. Is your site at all [handicap] accessible?
4. Did you purchase images for your website?
5. Does your site have a consistent look and feel on every page?

Navigation

1. Does your navigation scheme make sense to someone that knows nothing about your company or products?
2. How many clicks does it take you to get from the homepage to critical information?
3. Do you have to manually update HTML or other code in order to add a menu item?
4. Do you have any broken links, or Under Construction pages on your site?
5. Did you perform any usability testing on your navigation scheme before launching your site?

Technical Attributes

1. Does any page on your site take more than four seconds to load?
2. Does your site force people do download plugins to work properly?
3. Are you using Microsoft FrontPage or Word to create web pages?
4. Are you using any kind of content management system to manage your website? If so, what?
5. Did you know what your website looks like in browsers other than Internet Explorer?

Content & Updates

1. Is your content searchable?
2. How often do you update your website?
3. How do you let people know about the updates?
4. Was your content ported from your company’s printed marketing materials to the web?
5. Are you advertising other people’s stuff on your website (i.e. do you have banner or other ads on your site)?

Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

1. How many people visited your site last month?
2. What is the most popular content on your website?
3. Are you collecting user information on your site (name/email at least)?
4. Do users have the ability to respond to, or rate any of your content?

Stay tuned for next week when I discuss each of these items in more depth and how each can help or hider your success online.

Next: Part 2 - Evaluate Your Website