Usability Tip:
Keep Repeating Yourself

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

If you tell the same tired story over and over at parties, people will soon run when they see you coming! But Web visitors aren't nearly as discerning. They'll flock to your site and dive deeper into it if you constantly remind them how much the site has to offer.

Emphasize your site's wealth of valuable information with a good navigation structure and emphasis on text links.

They Won't Be Bored

Redundancy on a Web site isn't boring: it's a valuable way to emphasize important content and remind visitors that there's still more to see on the site. Use your navigation menu, text links, and content to get the point across.

While one visitor may carefully study your navigation menu, another may ignore it completely in favor of page content. The third may look at the images first and never notice the text you wrote so carefully.

People respond to page elements in different ways - that's why repetition and visual cues are so important. Use them to make your site easier to use and more enjoyable.

Consistent, Meaningful Navigation

The navigation system can make or break your site. If it's hard to understand, inconsistent, or broken, you lose credibility, visitor traffic, and sales.

That cool Java-driven menu or cutting-edge DHTML code you downloaded from a free script site may not be as great as you think. Either one may take forever to load or not work as you expect on older browsers. Forget the dazzle and think repetitive:

Check for broken links using HTML Toolbox's Link Check tool and use Browser Photo to view your page in 16 different browser and operating system combinations. Pay particular attention to the navigation menu. Visitors can't use it if the links don't work or display properly.

Emphasize Content Links

Visitors tend to scan content and quickly decide if it's useful. If the answer is no, they may just leave the site. Make sure your page content contains links to other sections or pages in your site so those impatient visitors will see valuable information.

But before visitors can click content links, they have to find them! Plain text links are valuable for search engine promotion, but problematic for designers. Some designers feel that the default underlining on links looks ugly. Think a Search Engine Power Pack kind of link. So they remove the underlining to give the text a cleaner layout.

Bad idea! What pleases designers confuses visitors! If you remove underlining, take other steps to emphasize your text links. Add at least two other visual cues that the text is a link.

Use CSS to mix and match these five visual cues to create distinctive text links without using underlining:

Our Webmaster TipsLinking With Style and Create Stylish Menus describe how to add styles, change the hover behavior and more.

Redundant Bottom Links

You really WANT visitors to read all the way to the bottom of the page, so don't penalize them when they do! Duplicate the main navigation menu by placing redundant text links at the bottom of the page. That way, when a visitor scrolls two or three times to read your entire page, she's rewarded at the bottom with an extra navigation bar.

That makes it easier for visitors to click deeper into your site instead of subtly encouraging them to click away from it!

But visitor retention isn't the only benefit:

Repetition Is Good!

So yes, follow this advice and you could end up with a link to your "Special Offers" page repeated 3-5 times on your home page:

And there's nothing wrong with that! You're giving search engine spiders several ways to find your most important page content. Even more important, you're making it easy for human visitors to navigate through your site.

Evaluate the promotion potential of individual pages in your Web site using NetMechanic's Page Primer tool. Learn if you've inadvertently used spam techniques, written enough content, chosen the right keywords and/or used them enough on the page.