Best Practices for your website

Main Navigation

Navigation menus span the top of your website and provide the visitor with a number of options to choose from. Its function is to allow visitors to get to the page they want quickly. Like most things in life, the rule here is temperance. Providing too many links as main navigation links makes the main nav bar seem cluttered and lessens the importance of each item. Make sure you have enough links to allow them to spread out and be easily distinguishable.

When possible, avoid main navigation menu items that have no drop-downs. The space for the main navigation is small but important, so it is best reserved for menu items with many subpages.

Quick Links

On many themes, there are one-off links that can be added to your header. These are best used for high-traffic pages that visitors will routinely come to find, like a Bulletin page. Quick Links should also not be redundant to your main navigation, so if Donate is on your main nav bar, it should not also be in your Quick Links. It's easy to mentally process fewer links, so avoiding redundancy helps with that and it adds a little more elbow room for the other links in the header.

An example of a type of quick link you would not want to use would be one for a special event. There are better ways to draw attention to a special event, for instance with a large, graphic/button or a slide in the Feature Region. A link that would be excellent to have as a quick link is your Contact Us page. A large percentage of people that come to your website will be looking specifically for your contact information. Facilitating their search will give them a good user experience.

Homepage

The homepage is the page everyone sees. For this reason, it's pretty common for everyone to want their pet project on the homepage. However, as you add in more and more, content tends to lose its relative importance as it goes from being one of six or eight things to one of 20 different items, all vying for attention.

To keep your homepage focused you should figure out what your target audience is. Is it for new visitors? Make sure links and information on how to get plugged in have pride of place. Is your focus on keeping familiar faces engaged? Make sure all the latest events and announcements are near the top of the homepage, making it easy to find those items without much effort. Identifying your target audience helps you streamline your homepage.

Some information, like a Mission Statement, is typically best kept off the homepage, and instead placed on an About Us type of page. While the Mission Statement can be important, once it's read, repeat visitors to your homepage will routinely ignore it. But even more than that, it doesn't lead to further engagement with your site's content. It's a block of information that's a dead-end. It would be better to use that space on the homepage to invite visitors to dive deeper into other information your site has to offer.

General Pages

Every page should have something on it. If you have a blank page, search engines may count that against your ranking. If you have a main navigation page that's blank because it's just serving as a major category, you can go into that page's settings and just have it link to the first subpage, as shown here:

Otherwise, when creating pages, be sure to add images here and there to break up the flow of text. There are a number of sites that offer free stock photos that you can use, such as.:

• https://unsplash.com/
• https://www.pexels.com/

We strongly advise against using a Google Image search, as those searches provide no guarantee that images you obtain are free-to-use and you could incur legal issues by using copyrighted images.

Additionally, when creating copy, it's a good idea to keep your site's keywords in mind, if search engine ranking (SEO) is important to you. If you'd like people to find you when they search for best food in Cityville, then that exact phrase should be worked in naturally a couple of times on multiple pages of your site. Don't overuse a phrase, though, as natural language algorithms can sense when you're being verbose just to gain ranking.

Testing Your Site

If you haven't already, it's a good exercise to roll-play as a visitor and pretend you've never been to your site before. What are you wanting to find? How many clicks and how easy was it to find answers to your questions? That is a great exercise to help streamline your site.