20
Dec
Great Navigation for Commercial Agents
The first contact most potential clients and
employees will have with your company will be visiting your
website. From that initial contact your audience will continually
refer back to this powerful ‘touch
point’.
Its staggering then that a large proportion of the UK’s
chartered surveyors and commercial property agents feel happy to be
represented by a drab and out-dated website. Yet we are seeing an
increasing amount that are looking to
improve their online appearance and seize the opportunity that
this will bring them in a competitive marketplace.
Nevertheless, although great branding and evocative design may
well capture the clients’ attention during that important
initial 3 seconds, something as mundane as your websites navigation
could play a huge part in whether they stay, return or even contact
you.
Navigation bar
You could be forgiven for taking the humble navigation bar for
granted, yet it can be a powerful tool encouraging the user to stay
and ultimately return to your website.
Frequent user research carried out across many sectors has shown
that users can be irritated and even feel obstructed by poor
navigation. We talked in the past about the
impatient behaviour we all exhibit on the web and poor
navigation will compound this. In fact 40% of visitors will not
return to a website that they felt delivered a poor experience.
This stat should be extremely worrying for a huge proportion of
the commercial property sector. Think of the amount of potential
commercial tenants, landlords, developers and investors that could
have been lost, never to return, even before you had the chance to
speak to them.
Where To Start
Review the content for your website. Always put yourself in the
customer’s position. How will they be using your website and
what information will they want to find first? We know for instance
that 70% of the traffic to property websites hit the property
search within the first three seconds for example. This is both
commercial landlords and tenants.
Limited Choice
Space is at a premium on your website, so limit the choices on
your navigation bar. You also need to facilitate a range of screen
sizes. The practical issue is that to accommodate all your options
you could have to reduce the font size so much on each menu choice,
that it renders them illegible.
If you have 8 or more options on your primary navigation
you’ll also confuse and confound the customer. Remember, they
are impatient. If they can’t find the information they need
quickly, they’ll leave. Ideally you are looking for between 4
and 6 primary navigation options, no more.
Being In The “Right” Place
Website design is awfully conventional. We all read from left to
right and equate moving right to moving forward. We therefore
naturally assume that actions will occur on the right. The
exception to the rule must therefore be the “Home”
link, which you should position left as we all see this as going
backwards.
Plain Speaking
Never try to over complicate or be clever with the language you
use on your navigation bar. Strive for single words or short
phrases. Ensure those are phrases your audience will be familiar
with and common to the commercial property sectors.
Unconventionality will only confound the user.
So that means clever terms like “get in Touch” have
to be avoided for conventional terms like “Contact Us”
or better still “Contact”. And of course remember that
issue of space, so try to keep your titles to 12 characters or
less. A problem perhaps if a major part of your business is
‘Agricultural Land’! But then would you even be able to
afford a website if you majored in agricultural Land?
Don’t Be Flash
It can look pretty and technologically dazzling, but animating
menu bars with flash will ultimately frustrate and annoy users of
your website.
In general the use of any Flash on your commercial property
website should be used sparingly, if at all. Flash will increases
page loading times and as we saw in
last weeks article, Google now considers page loading times
when ranking sites.
Philip Burrows, Marketing Consultant
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