It’s Important to Be Organized, Especially on the Web

Your whole life, you’ve probably been told to be organized—clean your room, your desk, your car, and the files in your office. You’ve probably always been either really good at it or not so good at it. Organization is important, but one place that it is even more important is on your website! A website needs to be laid out clearly with enough sections to break up content and topics, but not so much that you have 20 tabs on the main navigation bar. So what can you do to make sure your custom website is neatly organized and people can find what they need and enjoy visiting your website?

First of all, five to six items should be the standard for the main menu: Home, About Us, Products and Services, Testimonials, FAQ, and Contact Us for example. If you do have a blog or portfolio, you can also add this to the main menu, but keep this structure in mind when brainstorming for your website. You should also place your contact information in any easy to find place on every page.

If you have more pages you would like to add, use sub-menus. For example, you might have a page for each service you provide under the Products and Services page drop down menu. However, make sure the main navigation heading is click-able as well. It’s also a good idea (and becoming more and more popular) to make your logo a link back to your homepage. It might be a good idea to write down a Sitemap first—a list of all the links your site will have—before the site is built. If you are currently running a coupon deal or special, you can put it on each page with a “Click Here to Print” button or a link to download it. That will make the customer aware of the deal and remember to look into it before they leave the site. Another tip is to remember the three click rule-of-thumb: a user should be able to get to what they need or at least know they are close within three clicks. Be consistent with the way drop down menus appear (vertically or to one side) and try to avoid PDFs which the user has to download and often take a long time to load. Finally, don’t have all your content justified to the left side of the page or make the area of your site too small. It should be evenly distributed throughout the page and the browser.

What’s one of the most important tips for keeping your website organized? Ask a professional! Beyond Custom Websites and their web design experts know all about organizing websites, which we’ve done for thousands of small businesses. We will gather information from you and advise you on how to structure your pages, where to place content, and what type of navigation and links will work best for your business. Contact us today and you’ll see that you don’t have to worry about a thing. Beyond Custom Websites will serve as the organizer of your website for you.