In this edition of Web Enlightenment we'll be talking about why you need to be more than not crappy when it comes to your website navigation.

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Be More than Not Crappy
...Navigation and You

You ever notice how lots of websites just suck?

In fact - there are so many that the twelve year old site Web Pages That Suck has a feature called The Daily Sucker.

The most common element that sucks is the navigation, nothing like bad buttons to make a site really awful.

So lots of folks get concerned about this - and focus on making sure that they don't suck. You've probably heard the standard web navigation advice: clean, consistent and no mystery meat. (mystery meat is buttons where you don't know what they mean)

This is good advice and it is fair to say that lots of folks still aren't taking it - but recently I've been noticing that this is the spot where lots of Internet entrepreneurs just stop. They are so proud of having a website navigation that doesn't suck, once they've done that they think the mission is accomplished. Wrong.

A navigation that doesn't suck is actually the first step, not the last.

To take your navigation to the next level you have to make it efficient and useable - a heck of a lot more complicated than just making sure it doesn't suck.

People read from left to right and from top to bottom, so making sure that your more popular pages are to the left (or the top) is a great place to start. Your website statistics can tell you what your customers think is important.

By setting up your navigation so that the more popular pages are what people encounter first, you make your site more efficient - literally faster (and therefore better) to use.

You also want to review how useable the site is - and while this can get a bit complex there are definitely some basic principles to consider.

The first thing you want to think about is usually referred to as "learnability" - literally how difficult is it for users to accomplish a task for the first time. Every person that visits your site is on a quest, just thinking about it like that can be useful. They might be there to learn how to get to your physical location, or what your phone number is, or to buy a product. Have you made it easy? What would make it easier? Are you always trying to make your site more learnable? You should be - this is a never ending process.

The next thing to consider is common errors and what it takes to recover from them. If you had two buttons - one labeled contact and the other labeled locations - users might click on contact thinking they'd see a list of your stores. When they didn't would they realize that the locations button was the correct choice? How long would it take for them to figure it out? Take a look at your site with fresh eyes and think about the types of errors people might make, then work on making them less likely.

There are many ways to study your site navigation and improve it - lots of folks specialize in creating user groups to test your site so it can be scientifically evaluated. This is a great process and it is often worth doing, amazing insights are possible - but I thought you might like to know about an old web developers trick for this, it is hardly as good as real testing but it does often provide solid insights with very little effort.

You need a kid that can read, that has some minor interest in what you do, and a reasonable ability to concentrate for a minute or two. This child is usually somewhere between 6 and 10 years old. You want to make sure they have never seen your site before.

So once you've made the appropriate candy based bribe you want to ask the child to perform a few tasks at your site - like finding your phone number or buying a product. Then you need to put the kid in front of a computer - and here comes the hard part: you must remain totally silent and give no feedback or clues while the kid tries to do the task. With "real" testing they accomplish this by not letting you in the room.

The ways in which the kid gets confused, the places they get stuck - those are almost always the most common places your customers get stuck as well. If they don't naturally "get" it there is no question the navigation could be much better.

Remember that a navigation that doesn't suck is a good first step, but it is only the first step. Real testing is wonderful but if that isn't in the cards for you go buy a bag of candy and find yourself a willing kid - take careful notes and it'll be well worth your time.

Feedback that almost made me cry

When I was first getting started as an Entrepreneur I consumed lots of books, and my mother (that's the back of Mom's head there in the 1960 sign me up photo) had an endless list of "classics" she recommended, many of them from her days at HBS. From Dale Carnegie to Peter Drucker to Michael Gerber I consumed all the wisdom I could find - and in fact I still do.

One of my favorite classic books was published in 1983, Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson. This book sparked a movement and has spawned a business movement - there are more than 14 million copies of Guerilla books in print in 41 languages. Many university MBA programs offer Guerilla Marketing programs and it is the best-selling marketing series in history.

I tell you all this so you understand how privileged I felt to be corresponding with Jay via email, but I about lost my mind when he read my home page and sent me this:

"You are bang on target with your take on entrepreneurs and how they view the web."

So after I calmed down a bit I thought like a Guerilla should and immediately asked if I could use this quote and Jay agreed. Serious Woo-Hoo Indeed.

Jay Conrad Levinson
The Father of Guerrilla Marketing

Oh - and of course Jay checked out The Internet Marketing Song from our last issue but I suspect he was just being kind when he said: "I like the song. and you're a far better guitar player than i am."