You have a great website but it is not as popular among visitors as you wanted it to be. Your website contains informative content and relevant images. Then its time for you to think what is it that is restricting the visitors to come to your site. Other than the design and content of a website it is the usability that makes the visitors keep coming to your site.
Usability of a website is important so that users can find what they are looking for as soon as they visit your site. If your site is difficult to use or if it takes a long time to navigate the users will not stay there. So your site should be easy to navigate. Designing effective navigation is very important.
You should plan your website navigation before you start designing it. First think of the structure or taxonomy of your website. If it is a corporate website then you should give information about the products, services, about your company and provide customer support. If it is a personal website then you can give information about the author, his/her friends, and family, his/her favorite link and so on.
The next important step is organization of your website. You need to decide how you want your visitors to visit all the sub-pages from the home page. You might have the whole website live in one category or the sub-pages into different categories. Think from the visitors pint of view, how they will wander through your site. This will help you to design your website navigation in an easy way.
While your navigation design the most important thing you should think of is accessibility of your website. Make it as easily accessible as you can. This will attract and keep users on your site. Avoid using special effects that can distract the users.
Visitors come to your site to get useful information. Put relevant images in your site. An image can say a thousand words. The image you put in your site should describe the product or service you offer. Along with that give some text associated with the images.
Making the links clear is very crucial as well. A new user should easily understand where a link will take him/her. The links should not make them confuse and should not take them to a page they do not want to visit.
Finally it is important for you to keep the basic structure of the navigation same throughout your website. People often tend to change the navigation structure in the middle of creating the website. However this can make your site difficult to use. So try to remain the structure same.
A great website might not be successful just because of poor usability. So remember that making an attractive site is not enough. Making it usable and effective is even more important.
Daniel Robinson