Do you know that your blog’s main menu is a huge part of marketing? The design affects the traffic, search engine ranking and user friendliness. The impact is bigger than you think. Here is a video of incorporating your pages and categories.
How to Take Charge of Your Blog’s Main Menu Section
How to Take Charge of Your Blog’s Main Menu from Ellery Igot-Capo on Vimeo.
The 5 common mistakes to avoid when creating main menu.
The main menu text link is too long.
The main menu text should not be a sentence. With the staggering increase of mobile users, this really critical. The shorter the better.
It’s recommended to have 1 to 3 words.
Too many tabs or entries
According to Hick’s Law the time required to make a decision is a function of the number of available options
So, the lesser number of tabs or entries we put in the main menu, the better. The best pages to put are the most visited. For the new websites we would not know this yet. As your site aged it’s time to move that low traffic site from the main menu to the footer.
It’s recommended to put maximum of 7 tabs.
Multiple Drop-down
Some web templates have multiple drop down capability. This is when you have sub menus in a menu or sub menus to the 3rd level also called fly outs. As you know with sub menus it tend to play hide and seek, how much more with fly outs. This is very user-unfriendly most especially the mobile users.
It is recommended to use Mega Menus.. Commonly used among retail store websites.
Too generic
A lot of service related websites use the word Services in one of the Tabs or entries. This is too generic and the visitor might not be able to understand if its mot specific.
It is recommended to use the specific product or service, ex. Web Design
No Call to Action tab
When we started our website we all had a goal in mind.This call to action is the key. If you can make it where it stands out from the rest of your main menu items, like flashing or flickering, the better. Make it easy on your visitors so they can help you achieve your goals.
It is recommended to try anyone of the options below.
- “contact” button
- “free trial” button
- “sign up” button
- “free ebook”
Did I forget some common mistakes? Please let me know in the comments!