Paper to Pixel

Have you ever been into a maze? It’s almost the same as public speaking handbook tells about speaking in front of any audience. At first it seems fun, you talk every next step with excitement but after a while you start hoping that every next turn will take you closer to a way out or a place you are going to but in most cases it only takes you deeper and deeper into the labirynth. And what is even worse, there seems to be no escape from it.

What is your reaction to that, frustration, irritation, fear? Well one thing is for sure, you want to get out as quick as possible and you would use all the magic you can think of to do so. Unfortunately many websites these days are mazes like that. They take you deeper and deeper and sometimes a close button on your browsers window seems like the only way out.

So now, imagine how your visitor feels about such website. Not only he got lost but also had to use “magic” to escape from it all. Would he ever come back to the site? Unless he would absolutely had to, I doubt it.

So what you should do to prevent your website from becoming a maze?

Firstly, plan well, make your pages long, there is no problem with that anymore. In the past long pages were considered a usability error but nowadays in the era of blogs, online magazines and web articles it doesn’t seem a problem anymore. But do not make them deep by creating a complicated navigational structure with many levels the user has to go in.

Secondly, make your navigation well structured and tell the visitor where he is at all times.

Deep sites cause one extra problem, the content is usually split into too many levels. Where there could be one page on the topic you have five and four of them only confuse our visitors more.