The perfect blog hinges upon excellent web design. When a user visits your site, they need to be blown away by how clear and convenient everything is. This is primarily influenced by how simple it is for people to navigate your site.
What is website navigation?
You know when you arrive on a blog – or any website for that matter – and you want to take a look around? Well, the way you move around the site and visit different pages is called navigation. A good site will make it very easy for you to find exactly what you’re after without it being too confusing.
Why does website navigation matter for your blog?
Good navigation improves the user experience. In turn, this means that people will enjoy being on your blog. It reduces the chances of someone leaving and finding another blog to look at instead. If you’re new to blogging, then you should be aware that creating an excellent user experience is probably your number one priority. After all, your blog depends on users reading your content, sharing it, and coming back for more. If they find it too awkward or challenging to navigate your blog, then they’ll leave.
How do you improve blog navigation?
Now you know how important it is, how do you go about improving the navigation on your site? Well, here are a few ideas and concepts to take a look at. If your blog already ticks all of these boxes, then you can be confident that it has excellent navigation and provides excellent user experience in that domain!
Let users search
To begin, you need to let users search for things on your blog. Take a look at my blog as an example. Look at the plethora of blog posts I have on here. Many of them are entirely unrelated to others and will appeal to a certain audience. I know that people visit my site to view certain content. So, a search bar lets them find what they’re looking for. It’s a no-nonsense approach to website navigation. Give all the power to the user, and they can search for specific phrases or words and consume the content that relates to them.
As you move through this list you will see there are other methods of helping people find what they’re after. However, a search box is great for people that have specific queries or demands. It cuts out any needless wandering and allows them to get straight to business and find the posts they came for.
Split your content into categories and sub-categories
Another great way to aid the navigation of your site is to use categories and sub-categories. Again, this is ideal if you post about a number of different topics. It’s a fantastic method of splitting your blog up into relevant sections for each portion of your audience. Let’s say you run a blog that writes content about personal finance and business. Obviously, you have readers that want personal finance content but have no need for the business side of things. Without categories, your site becomes a big jumble for that audience. They have to try and sift through the irrelevant posts before finding the ones they care about. Ultimately, it becomes too much trouble and they’ll go elsewhere.
So, categorising your site allows people to click on a menu button and be taken to all the blog posts within a particular category. The way you categorise content is important as you need to ensure that the right posts go in the right sections. Some people use research methods like card sorting, to find out how users would group certain things into categories. This can be helpful as you understand how your audience would expect things to be categorised and can play to their tastes.
Similarly, sub-categories work in the same way. They exist to allow for more specificity in your categories. One category may contain loads of different topics, so sub-categories let you split things up further. Again, this improves your blog navigation as you make it even easier for someone to find what they’re after.
Image source (CC0 License)
Add internal links throughout your blog
Links are such an underrated feature to use on your blog. Typically, there are two types of links you will use: outbound links and inbound links. Outbound links do nothing for your website navigation as they lead to other websites. However, they can be very handing at improving your SEO and giving yourself a kick up the rankings!
Inbound links are the ones to focus on where navigation is concerned. As you may be able to guess, these links point to other pages on your site. They are a great way of providing neat pathways for people to go down. For example, you write a blog and link to another blog post that you already created and feel like the user may enjoy. They click it, and they’re taken there instantly. It’s a smart way of improving navigation if you ever mention different parts of your blog as well.
Alongside this, you can add internal links to other parts of your sit. For instance, make your logo at the top of every page an internal link. When people click it, they go back to your homepage. It’s a simple way of letting everyone go back to square one if they need to. Plus, links help make your site feel more interconnected.
Always check for broken links
One last thing to touch on is the idea of broken links. If you update your site or move things around, then some links can suddenly become broken. A user may click on a button or an internal link and be taken to a page that no longer exists. Obviously, this is awful for navigation, so be sure to check for broken links as often as possible.
This is a collaborative post
That brings us to the end of this post! Hopefully, there are enough tips here to teach you how to make your blog easier to navigate. At the same time, you should see why this is such a crucial thing to do.
