The navigation of a website or an application is its internal architecture, i.e. all the links that link the pages of a site together while making it user-friendly.

Also known as Ux design or user-centered design, the navigation architecture of a site meets two objectives:

• Make the visitor want to interact with the visited site. These interactions, which ensure the success of a site, can take the form of a telephone contact, an e-mail, a purchase, an appointment request or the download of a white book.
• Allow search engines to index its pages and content. Indeed, internal links help search engines to understand the content and context of the landing page, as well as the relationships between the different pages of a site.

To meet these objectives, your architecture must be simple and intuitive. But how do we do that? Let us look at all this together.

1 – Opt for a clear, pleasant and responsive web design.

Regardless of the device used: computer, tablet or smartphone, users must be able to navigate easily. Responsive design is the layout design that meets this need by automatically adapting a site to different screen sizes. To be as close as possible to the audience’s needs, a Mobil First design can even be adopted for sites that are mainly accessed from smartphones.

It is important to note that the advantage of responsive design is not limited to a simple improvement of the user experience:

• It improves the ranking of your site in search engines. Search engines penalize sites that do not have a responsive version.
• It reduces the duration of updates. Updates made on the desktop version of the site are automatically adapted to the mobile version and do not require any additional intervention.
• It reduces costs. The desktop and mobile versions are one and the same site, reducing maintenance and hosting costs.

2 – Optimize the home page.

The home page of a site or application must make it possible to understand in a few seconds the proposed offer of services and trigger the first interactions, it must clearly answer the following questions:

• Who is this company?
• What is she doing?
• What can this company do for me?
• What benefits will it bring me?
• Where do I click to find out more?

To evaluate the effectiveness of your homepage, you can use the bounce rate that google analytics measures it. This rate measures the percentage of visitors who once they arrive on this page do not visit any other page and therefore do not engage any interaction with your site. If you notice a high rate and a low number of pages viewed per visitor you will have to engage in a global reflection to rethink your site.

3 – State your offer clearly.

When a visitor arrives on the home page of a site, he or she must be able to say to himself or herself at first glance: “I am in the right place”:

• Use a clear layout, short and catchy texts and correctly selected keywords (relevant to your business and familiar to your audience).
• Boost the baseline (identification area) that contains the name of your site or company and the description of your services or products.
• Place 2 or 3 arguments in the header (top of the page) to convince the user to stay on the site and highlight a strong value proposition.
• Edit digestible, airy and concise editorials and structure them with titles, subtitles, bullets… so that your readers can easily browse them.
• Use the target audience’s codes (colours, vocabulary, visuals) to reinforce their sense of identification with your site.

4 – Apply the basic rules of Ux Design.

The list below is directly inspired by the 10 rules that we integrate into the Ux Design reflection phase of our clients’ projects (excluding e-commerce sites):

1. Simply name each page (and avoid long urls).
2. Create a logical and intuitive tree structure.
3. Limit the menu to a maximum of 5 tabs.
4. Eliminate sub-menus as much as possible.
5. Display essential and attractive information above the waterline (line that separates the visible part when you arrive at a site from the part below that will be visible using scroll).
6. Add a breadcrumb trail and a return to home button to allow the user to locate himself on the site.
7. Comply with the 3-click rule (the user must be able to access the information he is looking for from the home page in a maximum of 3 clicks).
8. Insert a search module near your menu (for sites of at least 5 pages).
9. Integrate judicious and incentive-based Call to Action.
10. Make the phone number clickable on the mobile version.

5 – Improve the performance of your website.

Too long a loading time can often result in lost sales, leads and missed opportunities. To ensure that your site will not cause you to experience such a misadventure, you can use Google Page Speed Insight, for example, which will give you an accurate calculation of your site’s performance (the test must be done for each page).

If the weight of your images seems to be the main cause of the slow loading you can easily optimize them thanks to the many free online tools. These tools also have the advantage of removing hidden data from your files and have a minimal impact on the visual rendering of the image.

If the problems observed have more technical aspects (unused CSS resources, javascript execution time too long, server response time too long…) nothing is lost, don’t worry! However, if the interventions to be carried out exceed your skills, we advise you to contact a web agency that will be able to consolidate your site on a long-term basis and ensure you a good level of performance.

6 – Create conversion possibilities with Call to Action.

Remember that the purpose of a home page is to encourage your visitors to navigate deeper into your site. By placing dynamic Call to Action (CTA) buttons on your site pages you guide your visitors through your conversion tunnel.

Well visible and strategically placed, CTAs transform the pages of your site into conversion pages. Their purpose is to allow visitors to engage with your site with clear and attractive actions that bring it a concrete benefit such as: encourage buying, facilitate the sharing of information from your site on social networks, subscribe to a newsletter, request a quote or offer….

To conclude.

Quality homepages are never static, they must be able to evolve regularly, to integrate changing needs and trends, the enhancement of your offer and customer feedback.

To limit the risk of making a mistake, first put a reduced version of your site online. This first temporary (but high quality) version will allow you to obtain valuable information (via Google analytics) on visitor behavior, keywords that generate traffic, the most clicked parts and will be of great help in the development of the rest of the site.

This empirical approach that we apply to our clients’ projects has a name: Growth Driven Design, it incorporates in particular phases of testing and analysis of visitor behaviour to empirically develop the Ux Design that best meets the expectations of your target audience.