An excellent website is easy to use, user-friendly and includes eye-pleasing graphics that lure a viewer in to investigate further pages. When a website is difficult to understand for the average viewer, users become impatient and will never return to your website again. Making sure your website is easily navigational is one of the most important aspects of having a superior and effective website. Designing your website with ease of navigation in mind will increase traffic and give your online business credibility.

Whether you are selling a product, offering information or providing a service on your website, you will notice that there is a formula for a well-designed website similar to yours that already exists online. The average person does not want to spend any time figuring out your website, they simply want to efficiently navigate through it for a specific purpose. Bombarding your viewers with your special brand of creativity may not be the best tactic to encourage people to stick around and navigate. Using familiar buttons, menus, underlined text or color changing fonts when including links on your site.

The “Three Click Rule”. Professional web designers live and design by this credo and your website should import this functionality. Research and studies have been conducted and the fact is that people do not want to click more than three times to get to the information they seek.

Keep it simple. While Flash movies and splash pages may make you feel like a techno-genius with a high-tech website, most users will find it annoying. If you are trying to sell a product or offer goods, services or information, you definitely don’t want to turn your users off by making them frustrated with your website. If you must use this element, make sure to have a button users can press to skip the fancy stuff and get to the meat of your website.

* All important information should be ONE click away
* Prominently display login boxes
* Prominently display shopping carts
* Make sure your links to other sites are active
* Keep your advertisements “above the fold” (visible without scrolling down)

If you keep the basic rules of easy navigation in mind when designing your website, your viewers will enjoy their experience visiting your site and you will increase the pages each visitor views.

This translates into increased possibilities that people will buy your product, investigate your goods or services and, ideally, escalate your earning potential!