A new page to talk about your therapists, another one for more spa photos, and then another page, and another — this is good! The more content the better. But then every new page is important, and so they all get added to your spa website's main navigation. That's where the problem comes in.

This is by far not the worst example I could come up with:

But it's easy to organize that menu a little bit, and make it more clear to our website visitors what is really important. We'll take "Therapists" and link to it as part of the "Spa Tour", link to "Policies" from "What to Expect" and move "Recommend Links" to "Articles". Those minor adjustments make an easier to navigate menu:

Just about everything on a spa's website can fit into this structure, and avoid menu overload. Our goal is simple — make it clear what we want our website visitors to do, and guide them there.

We make it terribly easy to add new items to your navigation in Dynamic Spa Websites, but that doesn't mean you should.

2 Responses to “Website Oversights: monster menus”

1. BJ Says:
   March 26th, 2007 at 4:42 pm

   Thanks for the advice!!! One compliment we get over and over is the simplicity of our website compared to others. But just like everyone else I want to tell the customer as much as I can. I will keep this in mind as I grow my site.

   BJ

2. Sean Says:
   April 3rd, 2007 at 10:38 am

   What you are advising is true for web surfer navigation, however, I'd be proceed with caution with this approach to some extent.

   You are bascially advocating taking some of your Tier 2 pages and making them Tier 3 pages (or possible Tier 4 pages).

   This will limit the amount of spidering of your content by some search engines. Even if the search engine deep spiders, it still may be some time until it gets down to those Tier 3/4 pages.

   If some of your content doesn't get indexed it won't matter, as these may not be the keywords to drive the traffic towards your site anyways.

   Clearly there's critical content in some those Tier 2 pages that I wouldn't want at a Tier 3 page, especially if it would get a site a hit by someone searching some less used keywords.

   I'm not disagreeing with your suggestion; just saying proceed with caution on how doing so will affect your ranking in a search engine.

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