Website Navigation – Keep it Redundant and Simple!

Two office colleagues high-fiving and smiling.

When it comes to creating user-friendly websites keeping it  “simple” with your design is always better. It’s also vital that with your website navigation you remember that redundancy equals good user experience.

It’s important to remember that there is still a large audience of people 40 and over that are not computer savvy. They still have a hard time finding valuable information when they visit your website. This doesn’t mean pile all the information you can on your home page it means to keep it simple.

Even today’s users prefer simple web design but for different reasons. they have shorter attention spans! They surf the web as natural as walking or tying their shoes it’s just a part of their everyday life. This has changed how people view web design. Gone are the days where you cluttered your website with text and photos. Web 2.0 created a new breed of simple better-branded web design.

Take a look at one of the largest brands in the world Coca Cola website. There’s nothing to it just a simple design that gives you the most relevant company information and has only a few navigational tabs to click on.

Over the years I’ve heard some funny suggestions when it comes to navigation. People get so uptight wanting to make things easy for people they don’t understand they are actually making it difficult. I had a nonprofit client that wanted their websites to have 11 tabs and they all had dropdowns. They thought by making all this information available to people it would increase people’s experience on their site what happened has they had a site no one wanted to visit. The trick is to learn how to curate the relevant content on your website and make the design as user friendly as possible.

Another example we had a client that wanted to change the footer on every single page to create a unique experience for their users. When you do this you confuse the user. If you keep changing the layout of your navigation, footers and headers you create a website that is impossible to navigate.

The trick with navigation is redundancy. You should use the same navigation, footer and header layouts on every page so your user understands how to navigate your website and allows for a very pleasant and natural experience.