From The Journal

Have you ever gone onto a new blog, read an article and REALLY wanted to read more from the person…I mean they had such an awesome blog post….but then you take one look at the navigation and the sidebar, and you can’t seem to figure out where the rest of the blog posts are?

The menu is cluttered with topics that don’t make sense, the sidebar is full of unrelated ads and buttons from random “organizations” that the blog is apart of. And yet you can’t find anymore posts to read ANYWHERE.

After a quick scan of course, you give up and click out of the page. Too bad, you really liked that first article.

We’ve all been there right?
 

Let’s talk about actions that you can take to be sure that your menu and sidebar are user friendly and easier to navigate.

The first rule, that applies to both sidebars AND menus is to keep it simple and give as few options as possible.

Often, we think that by breaking up our content into tons of tiny categories or having a bunch of different pages, we are sure to meet everyone’s needs when they come to our website. When actually, we have much more difficulty deciding what we want when there are too many options.

Think about visiting a big city with a ton of new, different restaurants, all with different foods and a good variety – you’ll more than likely have a hard time deciding on where you want to eat and sit and debate about it until you end up drawing restaurant names out of a hat to decide. Now think about visiting a small town with only two restaurant options – maybe one is pizza and one is a diner. Your choice is going to be MUCH easier in the small town.

Although we like the idea of different choices, and maybe all of those choices ARE wonderful, people on the internet do not often spend time searching through each of these options available on your site. They like clear, defined choices so that they can get exactly where they want to go with just half a second of looking.

So what does this mean for you?