< Embarking on a website redesign : What does your design say about you? >
Starting from your home page, can you get to every page on your site in three clicks or less?I'm guessing not, especially if you have a blog with lots of posts. However, if it takes more than three clicks to get around your site, any content that is "buried" may be missed by visitors who start at the home page.
Use simple and consistent navigation.
Whether you're viewing a blog entry, the home page, or the about page, you should be able to get to the main areas of a site in just one click.Every section of your site should have the same links across the top and/or down the side. Try to limit the amount of different navigation methods you use - the more lists of links you have, the more confusing your site will be to navigate.
Subscribe to your site.
I get the feeling that some people do not subscribe to their own site or click through to their site from the RSS feed (what's an RSS feed?). If certain sites did this, they would realise how confusing the links can be. Here are a couple of challenges I've been faced with after subscribing to a site:- Only a short portion of the post is in the feed - you have to click a link to view the whole post. This generates a click just to read the post after I've already clicked once to open it in Google Reader. The opening words would have to be very compelling to get me to click through. On some sites I enjoy them enough that I usually click through anyway, but I'm not a fan of "partial feeds".
- After reading the short portion of a post in the site feed, I click it only to find myself faced with the same content and a "read more" link on the site. I then have to click the "read more" link on the site to read the entire post. That's two clicks just to read one post. Ridiculous!
Organising your content.
If you're looking to get anywhere on your site within three clicks, I don't think you're allowed to search. In take a moment to organise your content, I look at how to keep things in order once you have more than a few posts on your site.I have some way to go with this, but I made a start by setting up my Tutorials section. Very handy if you want to find some of my guides and FAQs.
Don't rely on built-in sorting.
One thing I've noticed with some blogging platforms is that they organise old content by the month and year they were posted. If I used one of those systems, you could find last month's entries under January 2008.If you're brand new to my site, how on earth is this intuitive? Maybe some people will have time to read through everything in sequence, but I honestly doubt it. Maybe if you have a personal blog then it would be useful, but for other blogs it seems like a poor excuse for proper navigation.
On the other hand, some systems let you organise posts into categories. These can really help your readers to navigate your site. But what happens when a category gets really big? And what happens if you don't think your categories through too well and you end up with hundreds of categories with a few posts in each, or a couple of categories with virtually everything in?
Make it easy for your readers to find old content - sort it properly.
But don't go overboard with hierarchy.
At the other end of the scale, micro-management of your site navigation can make it very difficult for visitors to know where to find things. Having too many sections or categories invariably leads to situations where a post could go in one of two places. If you can't figure out where to put it, will your readers be able to find it? Will you?!Planning is the key.
If you think you can worry about the navigation later and just start posting right away... well, you'll have to do it someday, why not get it right from the start?Think of how your site should be structured before you jump right in. This will make it easier for your readers to navigate your site without having to click over and over again just to find a post. Again, I have a way to go with this as my blog is filling up every time I post.
Move irrelevant posts.
I've been gradually weeding out the old content from when this was a site to promote my music and moving it to my music blog. Sometimes things do change and you have to move things around.I've also moved some posts that are no longer relevant, such as the Entrecard competition post. It's still on the site, but it's not in the main blog anymore. Who needs to see competition posts once they've been posted? Create a separate section where you can store old posts.
What do you think?
How many clicks does it take to get around your site?How organised is your site?
What about the other sites you visit?
As a new visitor to a site, can you quickly find the best posts?
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Tags: three clicks, navigation, subscribe, organisation, sorting, structure, hierarchy, planning, irrelevant posts
Posted by Ben on February 02, 2008 21:46 / Edited: Never
Comments
i do not like partial feeds either - i've subscribed to your blog and that's how it comes. but i've not clicked more than 3 times to get around either.
Hi mlpieters - so you're saying that my site gives you a partial feed? It shouldn't do that - what are you using to subscribe?
Hi Mario - that's a good point and I hadn't thought of that. I can think of two solutions. 1 - sites could provide a full feed and a partial feed. 2 - find a feed reader that is specifically designed for mobile devices such as phones.
I don't know of anything that will satisfy #2, and some people will be confused by having too many feed choices - so I'm not sure what the best route is here.
A further point is that if more people use mobile devices to get online, the costs will almost certainly decrease. When I first got online in 1998, I used to pay a monthly fee for dial-up Internet as well as a fee for the amount of time I spent online. This has changed to broadband Internet with a flat fee for a certain amount of bandwidth. Would you agree that as demand increases for mobile Internet, the technology and pricing plans will evolve too?
As a mobile user, what would you expect to see?
Hi, Ben.
You're absolutely right when you say that as demand increases for mobile internet, the pricing plans will get cheaper. I would never say you're wrong.
It's clear fact, and it's happening here in Brazil too. Really slowly here in my city, but in big cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo the pricing plans are really exciting.
I think the better option is to provide two feeds: a "full text" one and a "headlines one". I don't think people would get confused with that if websites made clear which were the differences (as if the name wasn't self-explaining).
Thanks for the feedback Mario. I'll see what I can do about that in a future version of Majestic. :)
Hi, Ben.
I understand you when you say you prefer complete texts on feed rather than partial ones that require a click to read the full "edition". And I even agree with that.
But, about a year ago there was a discussion between some Brazilian bloggers and someone gave an interesting opinion, that made partial feeds make sense: the growing number of mobile readers.
Each day, there are more and more people who read feeds from their cell phones. Also, on cell phones you usually pay for the amount of data you download, not for the connection time. So, for those guys, a complete feed would demand more money, and they would only subscribe to those which have real good content. This would take away some readers from you. For those guys, it's much better to have a small headline and a link to the full text.
Maybe we never think about it when we read feeds on computers, but lots of readers out there do.
That's a nice point of view, don't you think?