To provide users with a great experience, one of the first and simplest places to start is your legal website's navigation. Creating an effective navigation means making a clear and simple way for potential claimants to find what they are looking for and to help them on their journey. In this blog you’ll look at five easy tips to help clean up your navigation and give your users that great experience they deserve.
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Layout comes first
Muddled and confusing layouts are a sure fire way to make visitors hit the back button and bounce from your website. You want the layout of your navigation (and your pages) to be clean and simple, allowing potential claimants to find exactly what it is they are looking for. Try to keep the number of pages in your navigation to a minimum and only use drop down and secondary levels if you really need to, these can make that clean navigation look rather messy and can be rather annoying to mobile users.
Placement is key
Allow visitors to clearly spot the navigation section of your legal website. Best practice suggests that you should have navigation at the top or on the left hand side of your website. But what is key is to make sure your navigation is above the fold, with many new website designs making the navigation fixed to the top of the browser window, so that as a user scrolls down a page, the navigation remains visible making it easier for the user to quickly navigate to a new page.
Site map
By producing a site map you not only provide search engines with a simple map to follow when crawling and ranking your legal site’s pages, but you also provide a great asset to visitors. A site map can help potential claimants to find specific pages and gives them a better understanding of your whole websites content navigation.
Search bar is golden
Many visitors already have an idea of what they are looking for when they arrive on a website, so by providing a search bar you allow them to get on with their journey and provide a great user experience. A search bar also has the function of allowing you to see what visitors are searching for on your legal website, which can be a great asset for your content team to generate new ideas which match what users want to find.
With these four tips you should easily be able to provide your legal firm’s website visitors with an enjoyable and efficient user experience. Why not check out this blog and learn four ways you can increase that experience with your content
