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Web writing and site navigation: helping your site’s visitors

April 9th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

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Most Web writers start off their career by writing for others’ Web sites. This means that you don’t need to worry about site navigation until you actually create sites of your own, at which time you discover that navigation is a complex topic.

If you let it, site navigation can freeze you into procrastination, because you’re trying to work out what you MIGHT add to the site in a year’s time, and how this will affect the navigation of your new site, right now.

I’ve struck precisely this snag in the Fab Freelance Writing site. The ezine archives are bulky and hard to organize, so for a few weeks I opted to discontinue the archives. I also intend to keep some of the ezine material as book content, so “no archives” seemed to be the way to go. However, no-archives mean that the site is less useful than it might be: material that could and should be online has been removed.

There’s a solution. of course - a blog.

Simplify navigation - create a blog

Over the past few months, I’ve shied away from creating static sites to creating blogs, chiefly because of the navigation conundrum. A blog is simple, especially a WordPress blog, you just add categories and pages whenever you need them, and hey presto - a new look for the site and plenty of room to grow.

So I may yet create a separate site (blog) for the ezine. Creating such a site is the simplest way to end navigation worries. A blog-site just grows as it goes, and by using tags, you make it very easy for your site visitor’s to find what they want.

Lorelle on WordPress has an excellent post “Blog Design: How Many Columns?”, which touches on site navigation:

The single most important feature on your blog is the navigation. Today’s web visitor rarely enters through the front door of your blog. They come in through your posts. As important as the blog title, post title, content, and other contextual information is, if the visitor cannot move where they arrive to other places on your blog, how will they ever know of all the other wonderful things you have done here?

The sidebar is a critical player in generating that movement.

Read the whole post, especially if you have a blog, or are considering creating one.