It’s a funny thing. We often place a large emphasis on the creation of great content and on the development of an effective design to wrap around that content. But without as much effort or thought put into your website’s navigation, your visitors may never be able to enjoy all that your website has to offer.
A B2B Web Usability Report released last year uncovered some interesting facts in support of the importance of well-made website menus:
They asked: “When you get to an internal page on a vendor website from a referral site or search engine, how do you orient yourself?” Nearly 50% of those who responded to the survey said they use the main navigation. In addition, 36% said they expect the company’s logo to take them back to the home page.
They also asked: “Which website elements annoy you or cause you to leave a website?” A total of 37% of respondents claimed a poor design or navigation as a source of frustration.
That being said, menu design and planning doesn’t have to be difficult. But like with any other element of your website, it does require serious planning and special tools in place to pull off a well-executed menu. Here are just some of the questions you may need to ask yourself:
Where do you want the menu to be?
How many menus do you need?
Will there be a home button or do you trust visitors to know that the logo is the link?
Do you need a hamburger menu design?
Do you want a static menu to be visible at all times?
Which pages need to be on the top level of the navigation?
Do you need to use color in the menu?
What sort of animation should be applied to the menu?
How do you want to organize the pages?
As you can see, there is a lot to consider in terms of building out a menu and each one of those features are open to customization. As a developer, you’re responsible for making sure that whatever you choose aligns well with the rest of your website’s style, functionality, and purpose.
Think of menus as a visitor’s map or tour guide of your website. In the end, it won’t matter how great your website looks if visitors can’t figure out how to find the information that’s the most important to them.
Planning Your Menu: Start with the Basics
Website navigation needs to do exactly what the name implies: help visitors navigate through the site. Here are some tips to get your planning off to a good start:
Identification: Identify all of the different pages that will need to exist on the website.
Optimization: Using the keyword research you used in writing content for the website, apply those same guidelines and principles for naming your website’s pages. It’ll also be important to strike a balance between optimizing a page’s name for SEO with something simple and straight-to-the-point.
Visualization: Use a visual mapping tool to lay out the pages of your website. For smaller websites (less than ten pages and a singular menu bar), Excel or PowerPoint would work just fine for your purposes. For anything larger, consider using a free trial with Slickplan or Power Mapper.
Minimization: When planning the levels of navigation, it’s best to keep the amount of clicking visitors need to do to a minimum. Ideally, there should be no more than two or three levels of navigation within a single menu. If so, consider multiple menus instead.
Organization: Navigation needs to be logical, from top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Introduce who you are (About), what you do (services, products, etc.), what resources you offer (blog, white papers, free consultation, etc.), and your contact info (Contact). The pages of your website will of course be tailored to your specific business, but the basic logic remains the same. Educate, speak to your audience’s pain, demonstrate your expertise, and then offer a point of contact.
Location: Place your menu in an easy-to-find location. No one should have to hunt around to find the menu that is going to help them explore the rest of the site.
Omnipresence: Consider making a menu “sticky” so that as visitors scroll down through a long page, the menu is ever-present. And if you do make the menu sticky, make sure it shrinks in size so that, while always there, it doesn’t distract from the rest the content.
Truncation: If you’ve got a very large menu, consider instead forcing it inside a hamburger menu or mega menu, and save that prime real estate on your site for something else. Hamburger menus are easily recognizable these days since they’re the standard menu for mobile devices, so you shouldn’t have to worry about visitors not knowing where to go on their desktops to find it.
Consistency: Any design or stylistic touches you make to the website should align with what is done to the menu. Complimentary colors, animation, and website CTAs should all be inspiration used to create the look and movement of a menu.
Mobility: The menu, like anything else on websites, absolutely, positively needs to be mobile-friendly and responsive.
Setting up Your Menu: Consider the Options
As with everything else in WordPress, you’ve got options when it comes to setting up your website’s menus. We’re going to review each of these options and then provide you with some basic knowledge that you’ll need to make the most out of each.
Option 1: Theme Menu Setup
Many WordPress themes will include a Menus module for simple setup and customization of your website’s theme. If you want to start within your theme’s settings, here is what you’ll want to do:
In WordPress, go to the Appearance tab and click on “Customize.” This will take you to your theme’s customization settings and provide you with a live preview of any changes you make.
From Customize, you’ll then see a sidebar to the left of the live preview of your site. Click on the Menus tab. (Interestingly enough, you’ll see that WordPress has done a great job of setting up their own menus logically and with simple labels for easy navigation.)
You’ll have two options from the Menus tab. Start with Main Navigation since this will allow you to define the setup of your main menu.
From the Main Navigation tab, you can then add new pages, remove pre-defined defaults, rename navigation labels, and revise the hierarchy structure, all through drag-and-drop. At the bottom, you can also define where the main navigation should exist on the website.
Click on the back arrow and then navigate to the Menu Locations tab. From here you’ll be able to define which menus will exist on different parts of your website. There are two important things to note here: 1) Your view and options will differ based on the theme you’re using. 2) If you’re planning on having more than one menu on your website, you’ll have to define those other menus through a different process before you can assign them a location. (Steps for that can be found below.)
Regardless of which of the setup options you pursue, the theme customization modules are an important tool to have when setting up the basics of a website. For information on WPMU DEV’s Upfront theme’s menu customization, check out this article.