5 Tips For Effective E-Commerce Website Navigation Design
E-commerce websites rely on visitor traffic more than anything else. Only when there is huge visitor inflow, there can be high chances of a sale. And one of the important factors that help in sealing a deal of making sure that the visitors have a good experience on the website. And for that, it is important to have a seamless navigation system on the website.
When visitors are able to browse through the website more easily, they are able to view the products better and make a decision. Therefore, it is important to design a good navigation pathway and make sure they have a effortless browsing experience.
Here are 5 tips to help you design a powerful and effective navigation system for your e-commerce website.
Make it Simple and Comprehensible
The navigation system of an e-commerce website should be easy to use as well as easy to understand. This is because you wouldn't want the visitors entering your website to get overwhelmed by the navigation before anything else. There are a lot of amazing tips and tricks you can employ on your navigation system but it is highly advisable to keep it as simple as can be.
Provide clear labels for all the pages and items. Also make your links descriptive so that visitors know what to find when a particular link is clicked. Appropriate categorization is extremely important in order to make it easier for visitors to locate things that they need. Also, make sure you place your navigation system in an appropriate place, either the top or left side of the web page.
Make it Accessible
Accessibility is a key feature of efficient websites. And it should be a key feature of your navigation system. You may not realize this but there is a huge audience base consisting of people with disabilities and if you fail to cater to them, you may be losing valuable business. These customers may use any number of devices to access your website including screen readers, Braille displays, magnifiers and so on. The navigation system of your website should be easily understandable by these devices. Try to place text-based navigation and skip links at the top of the web pages.
Provide Location Information
If visitors want to know where they want to go on a website, they would have to know where they presently are. This becomes all the more important for visitors who enter your website through some external links and not through the homepage. It is important to provide them with appropriate location information so that they know where they are and decide where else to go. Use breadcrumb navigation.
Use Layers and Facets
For large e-commerce websites i.e. the ones having a lot of product categories and several brands, it would be advisable to add navigations layers and facets. This includes defining various filters and parameters for the products and allowing visitors to refine their searches for the same. They would be able t o browse through the products by brand, price, type and so on.
Include a Search feature
A search feature is extremely important for a e-commerce website. It allows users to search for a product instantly instead of having to browse through multiple pages of the website.
Kabir Bedi is the senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, a reputed offshore web design company located in India. The company provides a range of web design services to its clients from across the world.
 |
OLDER: Are Cliches Killing Your Copy? | | | NEWER: Press Release Distribution-The Most Effective, Immediate and Authentic Way to Communicate with your Audience |  |
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account
Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.