Make Your Website Better

Most visitors who arrive at your site from a Google search land on a page within your site, rather than on your home page. That’s one good reason to make sure you include breadcrumb navigation on your site. You’ll see it on many websites, in the upper left corner beneath the navigation menu. It shows your site visitor exactly where the page is within the organization of the website.

It’s an essential best practice for websites that visitors should be able to see, at a glance, how the page they’re on relates to other pages. Keith Instone’s navigation stress test is a great way to evaluate any page on your site for ease of navigation. There are three questions that users usually have when they land on a page on your site:

Where am I?

What’s here?

Where can I go from here?

The stress test shows you how well any page on your site answers those questions. The best way to do the test is to use a page deep within your site, perhaps several clicks from your home page. You print out the page in black and white, and mark it up by following Instone’s instructions. It will help you see where you need to add links to keep users oriented.

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