Deep and Wide: Website Navigation Pathways

admin | Sep 15, 2009

In the past, I’ve made references to my ongoing struggle to maintain my current level of impending obesity, that’s not what this blog entry is about, and I’m sorry if the title caused confusion.  It’s about the growing complexity of providing a cohesive web presence for your web visitors.

Back in the day (I’m talking about 3 oil changes ago) managing incoming inquiries meant getting up on Google’s search engine results page (which was achieved by white text on white backgrounds, spamming your meta tags and building 30 websites and linking to yourself).  It also meant buying Adwords (I’ve got some great stories for another blog), and for the brave, getting a company Facebook page.

Let’s use company X for example.  Company X makes Xpills for middle aged men.  They help us grow hair, have energy and remember to take our Viagra.  They’ve got their super X website all WordPressie and Fontie cool.  They’ve got their Facebook page with 1,500 old geezers following them and testimonials from men around the world who have added inches to their self esteem.  Their company leaders are blogging about trips to the Amazon rain forest and discoveries of new revolutionary products and Brazil’s best hotel deals.  They’ve even got 2,000 middle aged male followers of their @geezer-tweet.  There are local reviews on 17 different sites, and at least 47 mentions on 30 other social media channels.

Now let’s say I’m interested in learning about Xpills.  How will I discover all things “Xpills” online?  What will I stumble upon (I don’t ask that in the dot-com sense)?  Herein lies the rub of Web 3.0 – we’ll call it “user pathways,” and the bigger the company, the bigger the challenge:  Organizing “all things web” and serving them up as helpful user pathways with well timed “calls to action.”

I became keenly aware of what I’ve since called “user pathways” when I bought my first toy jeep on a popular eCommerce site.  While checking out, I was asked, “Do you want batteries for that?”  Of course I wanted batteries.  What, are you crazy?  Christmas morning, new jeep, no batteries?  I’m no dumb dad.  “Yes,” click to add batteries.  Back button 3 clicks to the home page, if I had been served up the same question – I would have ignored it.  User pathways matter.

A decade ago when I accidentally built a website that changed my life, I accidentally asked the right questions:  “Who’s coming to this site,” and “What do they want?”  Since that time, every successful consultation I’ve given has asked those questions.  Projects that have successfully answered those questions and then built and designed around them have gotten wonderful reviews from visitors.  It’s all about the end-users and their journey of discovering you, one click at a time.

While “Who’s coming to this site” may remain the same question, “What do they want” has changed a bit.  What searchers find outside of your website is also growing exponentially.  That’s scary.  The winners in the next round will be those companies that can creatively engage an online community and creatively/effectively provide user pathways that dance in and out of social media mentions.  I might need some Xpills to get my head around this challenge.