Articles
More... More What? Or the Art of Linking
When visitors first arrive on your website, they have very little sense of how big your site actually is. They are moving around in a virtual place with no sense of space or direction. Navigation is designed to guide your visitors through the hierarchy of your website. It tells them what is there, so they can quickly find what they are looking for.
An important thing to know when your filling your web pages with text, is that most visitors will spend very little time reading all this content. Instead they skim, or scan the page for something that catches their eye. They are looking for a clue, a keyword, that is relevant to the information they seek. Once they find it, or something vaguely similar, they click, and they are on to the next page.
Usability expert Steve Krug puts it like this:
from Don’t Make Me Think – Common Sense Approach to Web UsabilityWe're thinking 'great literature' (or at least 'product brochure'), while the user’s reality is much closer to 'billboard going by at 60 miles an hour'.
Your website navigation can be divided in three main categories: the primary level navigation or main navigation (usually at the top of the page), the second level navigation (often to the side on the left or right), and the in-page navigation (text links within the body text of your web page).
Because the links in the first two categories usually consist of just one word or a few words, choosing keywords that describe the target of those links isn’t that difficult and it forces you to be clear and concise. But in-page links often need to be more descriptive to make sense. That means that the clickable link text needs to describe the target page so that the sentence makes perfect sense on its own, without the context of the paragraph proceeding it.
This becomes really important when your website visitor is using a screen reader. This is an assistive device that reads the content of your web page to the visitor often used by blind or low-vision users. Usability testing has shown that many screen reader users will skip from link to link or use a feature called a Link List box. This feature brings all the links on a web page together in a separate box and allows the users to move quickly through the links until they find what they are looking for. So obviously links like “click here” or “more” just don’t work because the Links List removes all context from the links.
People who use screen readers are just as impatient as your other website visitors. They will scan the page looking for a relevant link, only they are using their ears instead of their eyes. They don’t listen to every word, just as other visitors don’t read every word. So it is very important to use the most descriptive keywords and to put these in the beginning of a link.
I won’t hurt your business if your website is a little too easy to use… there’s no such thing! Anything that benefits visitors who use assistive technologies can also benefit regular visitors. Navigation should be always be intuitive and self-explanatory. Most internet users are not paying close attention and they won’t appreciate having to decipher clever jargon to get to the information they are looking for.
Navigation is the single most important part of your website. If your visitors can’t find their way around easily, they simply won’t use your site.
More information can be found on the following websites:
The online home of Web usability consultant Steve Krug... >>