June 06, 2014

Don't Put That Link in Your Main Menu!

One of the challenges of managing website content — particularly for a large state agency that provides a lot of services — is figuring out where to “put” all that content so it’s easy for constituents to find.

Often, the first reaction is to add all the content in the main menu, and sometimes that’s just where it belongs. But there are some types of content that just don’t belong in your navigation menu.

External Links

Your state agency has a lot of different services. Sometimes, that means you have things hosted on more than one website. Maybe you have a web application hosted by a third party, or you’re using a special service to host all your videos. Perhaps you work closely with another agency to provide a specific service, and that service has its own website. So you want to provide links to those external site locations directly from your main menu, where you hope website visitors will hover over all the menu items, looking for just the right link to click on. And that will work just fine for some of your visitors, the “browsing” demographic who really knows what they want AND where to find it.

But linking to external content from your main menu has a couple of major drawbacks, too:

  • Your external link won’t show up in your search results.
    So you’ve served your “browsing” demographic by providing a link in the menu, but what about your users who go right to the search bar to look for things? Your menu link won’t show up as a search result, leading all those searchers to believe that you don’t have what they’re looking for.
  • Your users don’t expect a menu link to take them off your site.
    Put simply, users have different expectations for menu links than they do for links inside your body text. If they expect your link to take them to another page within your website, and instead the link takes them to another website, your users are likely to be confused about where they landed. Not only will they no longer see your menu links, but they may not understand WHY they don’t see them — your user wasn’t expecting to be taken off your website. This may be particularly jarring for mobile users.

PDF (or other document) Links

As I’ve mentioned before, any time you can put your content into a web page instead of a PDF or other document type, you will be doing a great service to your audience. If you’re tempted to link directly to a PDF from your menu, first ask yourself if you can make it a web page instead. You may still decide that it needs to be a PDF — state agencies love their PDFs — but please don’t link directly to that PDF from your main menu.

Like external links, users don’t expect a menu link to download a document. This disrupts their expectations and their overall experience on your site. For mobile device users, clicking a document link may jump them into another app altogether, or result in an error — so we should always make note of what links are document links, which is not easy to do in a navigation menu.

So what’s the solution?

I’m so glad you asked! The primary solution is to link to that content from the body content of a web page. For a link to an external application or service, this web page gives you the opportunity to write a short description of the service, which will show up in your search results, then providing a link to that service. And for applications or services that are integral to your agency’s function, we find that the best spot for a link is front and center on your agency homepage.

For documents, you have a similar opportunity to list a description of the document, its file size, and indicate that it’s a PDF or Excel spreadsheet, etc. This way your users can make a more educated decision to download the content.

Related Links

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