It can be really hard to attract traffic to a website. The competition is though and almost everyone know basic SEO. Conclusion is that you need to get as much as possible out of each visit. In web traffic/analytics language this is called bounce rate – the number of page views per visit. The higher the number the worse your situation is. It is hard to generalize and say what a good enough bounce rate is, but if you can keep it below 40-50% you’re doing OK. I’m not saying that navigation can fix your bounce rate alone and there are many other thing you can work with. However good and user friendly navigation may help users find what they are looking for if the entry page they landed on is not the right one. It may also invite them and create curiosity to go deeper into the site and just look around.
There are many ways you can design navigation and it can be hard to know what works well for your site. If you are not sure if your navigation works well and if user find it useful you may consider using heat maps to analyze what is actually going on. There is one important rule of thumb though and it is not to use flash and JavaScript to build the navigation. Reason is simple. Navigation should also be effective and easy to use for search engine spiders and further you don’t want to risk that some people cannot see your navigation. Typically I recommend customers to use simple WordPress themes for building websites that rock and if it is e-commerce site I think an Opencart theme or WordPress e-commerce templates is a pretty good option. This article provides a showcase of more than 35 navigation designs for your inspiration. Some of the examples have many photos in the design. If you want to build sites like this I recommend you check out some photography WordPress themes.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Very few people pay close enough attention to the navigation. They don’t seem to understand it’s the gatekeeper to profits. An easy-to-use and inviting menu makes it a pleasure to coast around and interact with a site… and eventually, make a purchase. thanks for a great post and inspiration (I myself was moved by one of the more simpler ones, http://www.vbg.si/en/).
—Ivan
Thanks for your valuable opinion!
I think Ivan has actually made a really valid point, having a sucessful website doesn’t just mean making certain key parts work well or look good, I think navigation is key, especially if you have a site that sells products, with their own page.
some of the examples though, are not great examples, you can go too over the top with the design and layout if you try to fiddle with it too hard and then what happens is you get a website that is basically one big navigation bar with a small pciture and logo next to it.
Nice list, very cool, thanks!
very nice list . they all looks really cool, but one have to make sure that the interface is usable by even the naive user to achieve the success they need. i appreciate the post…:)
nice info for web designers…
keep it up…:)
nice article !
The writing about bounce rate is good for me.
I got a lot from this article.
thanks
extremely cool navigation menus…….keep it up
good internal-linking is the Key for a low bounce rate. nice article.
I was curious if you ever thought of changing the page layout of your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or 2 pictures. Maybe you could space it out better?
Thanks for these designs. I am a new web designer and always worrying about design before start designing a Webpage psd design.
nice info for us all thanxx admin
This is really very informaion
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