Every website needs to stand out from the crowd. With great branding and colour schemes, striking visual content and a great landing page, a web page should be on its way to success. But navigation around your website is also a really important aspect of web design. Get it wrong and your potential customers will leave without signing up, or converting. And you’ll have missed a golden opportunity. Here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are web design and web marketing experts. And we know how to combine web design and link building to achieve some fantastic results. As a result, we have produced this guide to web design and link building.
What is link building?
Links serve a range of purposes when it comes to your digital presence. Firstly, they can be used to help guide your customers through your website, using a navigation bar as well as sidebar and footer links. Links in your content can also lead to other website pages. This is known as internal link building. At the same time, you need to make the most of external links, to generate more traffic and boost your web authority. This is known as external link building.
When it comes to your web design, the internal link building will be the most influential.
What is internal linking?
Internal link building is all about joining together the pages of your website, in a way that will make sense to your user. So your navigation bar or menu, your links in the sidebar, or the page footer, are all incredibly important, not only for SEO, but also for the functionality and practicality of your website. That’s because, using these links carefully and thoughtfully can enable your entire website to flow together, from the welcome page to the contact page. And if you get the design of this right, you will be providing a better user experience, which in turn will help to raise conversions.
Furthermore, links to internal pages can be placed within content like blog posts and articles. This can help users to navigate to relevant content on the main body of your website, and can promote sales. However, links that aren’t relevant, or links that are seen as spam, may result in a Google penalty. So getting these right is essential.
Web design and link building
Designing navigation bars and menus is more than simply choosing a colour scheme. Here are some tips to help you get it right:
- be aware of Hick’s law- This law states that the less choice someone has, the less time it takes to make a decision. In terms of webs design, this means that menu bars with too many options will overload and overwhelm potential customers, and make it more difficult for them to find what they need. In fact, they might even stop trying. So you need to design a navigation bar that links your main pages, without confusing your potential customers.
- Responsive design- too many websites are still relying on a hover menu. If you’ve ever tried to use one of those on a mobile device, you’ll know it just doesn’t work. So instead of overwhelming them with choice, your customers have no options available to navigate your site. This is just one example showing why your navigation bar and menu need to be responsive.
- Logical choices- if you are going to categorize your navigation bar or menu, make sure you use logical choices. Pages under ambiguous sections will not be found, and your user will simply give up and move on.
- Colour scheme- although colour isn’t the be all and end all of your navigation bar design, it is still necessary to make sure your options are easy to read, clear and fit with the overall website style.
For more information or advice about web design and link building, get in touch with the professionals today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.