1. You will always battle with finite space in any navigation bar (even if you use pull down menus).
2. People can’t easily process too many choices at one time.
In modern content management platforms like Metro Publisher, you can create sections or subsections at any time. Which is a blessing but can sometimes be a curse.
The curse is that it’s easy to do. And when you are setting up a site, there is an impulse to just get going. But planning the navigation and, with it, your site’s structure is probably the hardest and most important part of a site launch.
Finite Space
Since there is only so much space to fit in everything from sections, subsections, or external resources you may want to point to (such as an online shop), here are few things to watch out for.
Keep your title as short as possible
Often new users will insert long titles into the navigation. Many of these titles can be trimmed down from three or more words to, perhaps, one or two while still retaining their original meaning and purpose. By being very prudent with the number of words in the navigation, more room is available for more sections. In short, cut any words you don’t absolutely need. And don’t be afraid to ask others for suggestions of alternative or shorter titles.
Avoid repeating words that are in your site title or logo
This is a mistake we have seen many times. For example let’s say you run a site called “New Haven Family.” You do not need to repeat the word “Family” in every navigation title, such as “Family Fun,” “Family Events” or “Family Health.” Your readers understand you are a family magazine by your title -- they aren’t confused if you don’t add it to every navigation element. This rule is the same if you are writing a niche magazine about a subject like, say, wine. You don’t need to have section or navigation titles like “Wine Events” or “Wine Travel.” Chances are that the title of your brand already includes the word Wine in it. Variations of this mistake include creating acronyms. For example, a site that is called Palm Beach Living does not require sections entitled “PB Events” or “PB Dining” to be clear to the readers. The same titles are clear with adding “PB.”
To some of you this advice may seem obvious but we have seen this on more sites than we can count. Avoid this particular mistake at all costs!
Inclusive Titles
In most cases, try to create titles for sections or navigation elements that are not too specific and therefore might exclude some content that would otherwise be related. For example, a city magazine might want to have a section entitled “Restaurants.” If they have a lot of reviews of restaurants, this might work well. But, if that same magazine has a mix of reviews, recipes and any other gastronomy related articles, a better section title might be “Food” or even the slightly longer title “Food & Dining.” By creating an inclusive title like “Food & Dining” there is a better chance for all the diverse content types to have an appropriate home within your site structure.
Keep choices simple - not everything is section worthy
You may feel this urge to make every topic that you write about an item in your navigation. If you do so, your navigation could be too large, spilling over with many sections and subsections. The first problem from this approach is that a large crowded navigation provides a poor user experience (especially if you use pull-down menus) for your readers. But also, you may write frequently about some topics while hardly ever about others. Creating too many topics as navigation elements puts constant pressure on you to fill too many slots with new content. The result often is a real imbalance among the various sections of your site with some being full and up to date while others rarely updated with new content. To avoid this common mistake, you should survey your content and make sections that have inclusive topics, but also topics that you publish content for regularly. You need to think very economically about what topics are important enough to warrant a place in your main navigation.
Tags as an alternative to navigation items
Tags are an excellent way to drive your readers to other topics that do not make the cut for a place in the navigation. With tags and topics pages, your readers will be able to discover articles that are similar and therefore interesting to them in the context of articles they are already reading.
What’s interesting if you look at many successful online only publishers is that many of them don’t make use of a navigation bar at all. There focus is all about the homepage. Granted many of them have a sequential or blog like feel to them, but the takeaway is that they are focused on keeping the homepage updated frequently so that there is an incentive for people to come back continuously. And yes, they can do without a navigation because there readers can discover similar stories through tags and topics.
As always we hope this article helps you avoid common mistakes that are difficult to fix later.
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