The one assumption you need to make to follow along with me
in this article is "People Buy People." It can be a hard
concept for many people to understand and agree with.
However, millions of spent dollars have proven this premise
to me, so I consider it more of a law than a theory.
If you understand the rule that people buy people, then
your website MUST have a pleasant atmosphere that allows
the visitor to connect with you, your company and your
products. By now, you've heard me talk about our Celebrity
Branding philosophies, and the fact that you need
your picture on your website goes without saying. But,
there are some smaller, often overlooked, areas that
shouldn't be forgotten. Here are three simple tip to make your website
user-friendly: 1. Navigation The navigation on your site is probably its most important
element. If visitors find your site confusing or cannot
successfully navigate through it, they will leave. Make
your navigation bar as simple as possible. One of the
worst mistakes is using an expanding navigation bar that
makes the visitor scroll over it in order for the menu to
reveal their options. Most often, this type of navigation
bar has too many choices; your visitor doesn't know where
to go, so they get flustered and leave. Navigation on your site is an art, and you should direct
your visitors through a logical path to where YOU want them
to go (not to where they think they want to go). One way
to do this is through call to action buttons or CTAs. We
use these buttons on all of our sites; a visitor will go to
a main page, and then we can direct them to the parts of
that site that we want them to be aware of. We use this
method instead of an expanding menu, because we find that
it is more logical for visitors. With this method, you can
direct visitors to where you want them to go, allowing you
to control the buying process.
Quick Tip: most "expanding menus" are created in Macromedia
Flash. Search engines cannot read Flash, and therefore
they will not pick up these links on your website. If the
search engines do not pick up the links on the navigation
bar and these links are nowhere else on your site, they
cannot accurately crawl or index your site. This is search
engine suicide, because without even knowing it, you are
stopping search engines from understanding what your site
has to offer and from driving traffic to you. A good rule of thumb is that a visitor should be able to
get to every page on your site with two clicks from your
home page. Now, this is not realistic for very complex
sites. If your website is complex, you can have a sitemap
to help visitors navigate. Some sort of search function
may also be a good idea for your site. 2. Page Load Speed
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Known as the "Online Celebrity Producer," Lindsay Glass
helps her clients tell their stories in the online world.
Lindsay began freelance writing in 2000 and soon after
launched her own PR firm that thrived by offering an
in-your-face "Guaranteed PR" that was one of the first of
its type in the nation. She is now a founding partner of
DNG Media Group, LLC. For more information, please visit
http://www.dngmediagroup.com
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