Your Navigation is too Cluttered! Let’s fix that…

If you are like most nonprofit organizations, you have a ton going on in your community and you have a lot to say about all of it. If you’ve been around more than two weeks, you probably also have a lot of evidence of the good work you’ve already done. And of course, you are supposed to put all of that up on your website. If you have important stuff on your website, it ends up in the main nav. And when that gets full, you have tons and tons of dropdowns. 

Now, things have changed in the way we think about what a website should look like and how it should be navigated. In the past, the wisdom was “keep your clicks to three or less” for any action you want performed on your website. If site visitors can’t get there in three clicks, they won’t do it.

But the result of that kind of thinking was to stuff the main navigation and have tons of drop down menus to fill the gaps. Create as direct a line as possible to the desired goal. 

You may or may not be aware of that thinking, but you have certainly seen it in action. You may have even inherited a website that was born from that principle. 

But there's a problem with that kind of thinking. For one, it turns out not to be true. And it creates a deeper problem. When site visitors are confronted with too many choices, they experience decision paralysis. That is, when given too many options, they choose nothing. It feels helpful to show people all the possibilities upfront, but really what they want is a curated experience.

These days, web designers try to keep the main navigation to five items max. Fewer if you can get away with it, and do away with the drop down nav entirely. 

Most nonprofits have a very difficult time doing that. There’s just too much going on, your organization is too complex there’s too many different audiences and too much to share. So nonprofit websites get a bit of a pass, but not too much. The goal should still be simplicity and minimalism when it comes to your navigation. If nav items can be combined, do it. If nav items can be eliminated, do it. 

We have yet to design a website navigation that can’t be tamed into simplicity. If it happens it happens, we aren’t ideologues. But every labyrinthine, over-the-top navigation that we’ve been handed, so far, has submitted to the “five or under '' rule with some careful editing and consideration. 

Here are some of the ways we’ve handled that: 

Take “home” out of your main navigation. Your logo should link back to “home” and the back button will work just as well. Easy fix. 

Combine any nav items you can. Eliminate anything you can. Chanel a bit of Marie Kondo. If it doesn't "spark joy" (or serve the primary purpose of your website), ditch it.

Create icons to navigate to subpages. For example, instead of creating a dropdown menu under "Services" that lists all your services, just include one link to your Services page, and let site visitors navigate to specific services from there, that's if it is even necessary to maintain a separate page for each service. Ideally, you probably want people contacting you directly to find out more about your offerings than doing all their own research online.

Remove social links from the main navigation. Now you want social, but you want your site visitors to go to social first. If they are already on your website, even better! You don’t want to drive people from your website to your social media and then out again into the mysterious void of inattentive scrolling never to return. You want to pull people in from social to your website. It’s okay to link social in your footer, because people headed there are looking specifically for your social links, probably because they want to like and follow you. That’s cool! But if you offer it up first thing, you’re just losing people who might have otherwise stuck around for the ride. Don’t offer too many exits right off the bat. Assume people want to get as close to your organization as they can and your job is to help them do that. Your job is not to help them keep their distance, they can do that on their own if they so desire. 

Replace those social media links with a button. That button should be the whole point of coming to your website. Think, if there was one thing I want people to do once they are on the site, one thing that would make that visit a success, what would it be? 

People read websites in an “F” pattern, so the elements that you place in the top corners of your site are very likely to get read. Save those sections for the most important information. Your logo, your mission statement, and your call to action: Donate, Connect, Volunteer. Things like that. Make that action as easy and as intuitive as it can possibly be. 

Keep what really matters to the people who matter to your organization, and ditch the noise that’s getting in the way!