Website navigation is one detail you don’t want to skimp on. Mistakes can have a negative impact on your search rankings as well as user friendliness, however they can be avoided by following a few best practices.

It’s easy for your site to spiral into a messy clutter of music clips, video, photos and links, but with a little thought your site will gratify your current fanbase and encourage new listeners to keep in touch. With a carefully calibrated design, you can present a large amount of information without confusing or overwhelming visitors.

Website Navigation Placement

The web audience expects to see vertical navigation down the left side or horizontal navigation across the top. Placing your navigation in the usual places makes sites feel more familiar and much easier to use. As a result, your visitors will flip through more pages and fully immerse themselves in your music. Organizing and designing navigation can take a variety of shapes and sizes, but this is one detail not to overlook. Poor navigation confuses visitors and encourages them to make a hasty exit.

Text Content

Keep text content to a minimum. This includes your biography, album/song descriptions and media reviews. Using too many words will bore visitors shortly after they arrive on your site. Concise descriptions are key. If you feel the need to provide more detailed information about your music, link to pages where visitors can read more rather than dumping huge blocks of text on the homepage. Visitors interested in more information will take a peek at these text pages, while the rest won’t be weighed down by an overload of verbiage.

In general, people access your site to check out your songs – not your life story. As a way to engage with the audience, think about adding a few lines about each album to elaborate or explain your music so that people can gain a better understanding of the craft.

Site Optimization

Remember that Google and other search engines are unable to search text in images, but they can search written text. Providing text about your work can increase the likelihood that your site’s pages will appear in search results.

Your site navigation is a significant opportunity to prove your relevance on Google and other search engines. The home page typically carries the most authority with the major search engines. There are more links to the home pages than to your interior pages. If your home page contains dozens of links, it dilutes your authority with search engines.

Drop-down Menus

Drop down menus can be a deal-breaker when visitors are navigating your site. Drop-down menus may actually encourage visitors to glance over the most relevant pages. By placing dozens of links directly on the home page, you diminish the quality of your site. With fewer menu items, your visitors are less likely to overlook the most important items. Each time you remove a menu item from navigation, the remaining items gain in prominence.

Bottom Line

Your goal is to showcase your music in a beautiful package, not tangle up your site visitors with difficult transitions and dead-end links. Navigation should be descriptive so that the visitor knows exactly what to expect when clicking on an item. Help visitors find what they’re looking for by making your site navigation intuitive.