It’s tough to stand out as a creative business owner. That’s why it’s so great that excellent branding and web design can help us showcase our uniqueness and connect with our ideal clients.

But unpopular opinion alert: your navigation bar is NOT the place to show off your uniqueness. I’ve seen this trend all over lately in the creative field, and especially in the wedding niche. It’s great to do something creative and fun with your website, but never at the cost of usability. When it comes down to it, your website is an airport, not a museum. Your visitors came to your site to GO somewhere, not to stand around and admire how pretty it is. A cluttered or unclear navigation menu makes it harder for your users to find what they’re looking for, and puts you at risk of losing their interest and business.

 

Three Tips for Better Navigation

Here are 3 tips to ensure that your navigation menu helps your users get where they’re trying to go:

 

1. It’s discoverable and readable:

Death to the hamburger menu! Those three little lines are perfect for your mobile site, where screen size is majorly decreased, but never on your desktop site. It’s important to lessen the amount of thinking the user has to do. When your menu items are hidden in a hamburger menu or other cutesy icon, your user has to think “where is the contact page?” Oh, it’s probably here. Okay, there it is.” It’s better if they can see it plainly and click on over to complete that contact page without having to think twice. In that vein, it’s also important that the font is clear to read (don’t use a script font here)!

 

2. It uses plain language:

Your menu is not the place for your brand voice. Use straightforward language and tell it like it is. Again, it’s about decreasing thinking for the user. Don’t make them guess what you mean. Just tell them. For example, it’s not a “showcase,” it’s your portfolio. It’s not a “journal,” it’s your blog. Make things easy on your user to win them over.

 

3. It has proper logo placement:

There’s a law in web design that “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.” That means that you should follow convention whenever possible. When it comes to navigation, the convention is to have the logo on the left and navigation links on the right, though it is also acceptable to place your logo centered (and don’t forget; your logo should ALWAYS link back to your home page).

 

Take a look at my navigation menu for this site. If you’re using a desktop computer, you’ll see that my menu items are listed without being hidden in a hamburger or other slide menu. My menu items are named plainly: “blog,” “contact,” etc. I’m willing to bet that you didn’t land on my homepage and think “Wow! What a beautiful navigation menu!” But I’m also willing to bet that you didn’t have to think twice to find whatever it is you came to find.

I challenge you to update your navigation menu with these three tips in mind. Doing so will improve the experience for your users and make it easier to show off what really DOES make you unique: your passion and talent.