Happy and returning visitors - links we like

A crucial factor to people staying on your website and coming back to it are well positioned and designed navigation bars. The moment someone starts spending time searching and clicking randomly frustration will arise, and you can be pretty sure that those visitor are never coming back. Well placed navigation means that all the information they were hoping to find is present and presented in an easy to read and click through manner. And this should apply for computers just as much as for mobile devices and tablets, which is why I usually try to stay away from drop down menus. Drop down menus work beautifully on computers where the mouse hovers over the link to reveal all its sub links. But tablets and mobiles are tab based and tapping your way through drop down menus is not a very elegant way of navigating.

Links and SEO

But links are also very important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). I keep coming across websites where all the links are made of two rollover images.

From a web design point of view using images can become very tedious when you want to make changes. Every single image needs to be uploaded, tagged and linked, and when you are making changes, they all need to be edited in photoshop and re loaded and re tagged and re linked. And if your client still isn't satisfied, then each of these links needs to be edited and well you get the point.

From an SEO point of view they just make it impossible for search engines to find your website. Search engines grab text from your website, such as links, headlines, meta tags, and the more relevant text and the more movement there is, the higher the search engine ranking will be.

CSS styling to your links

List menus are used to create the basic foundation, the html coding for your site navigation. Without CSS styling what you will see is a rather dull bullet list similar to that of a word document. But with a style sheet attached it can be formatted in any way you want and need (horizontal, vertical, drop down menu e.g.) and any changes to the CSS linked to your list menu will occur on every single page of your website, no fuss.

So, keep it simple and easy to make changes, and ensure higher search engine rankings by using list menus and CSS!

Web designer Selma Karlsdottir shares her expertise in html and css coding on http://liberateyourweb.wordpress.com/. Her company Liberate Your Web specialises in creating websites with integrated social media and other online marketing tools to generate quality traffic to your website. http://www.liberateyourweb.co.uk/