Have you ever thought about the importance of having a website that’s coherent in its ability to take a user smoothly from the first page to the last page?  If you haven’t then now’s a good time to start.  So, how is the flow on your website?

A website should never leave the person who’s surfing it at a dead end or unable to go back; this will most likely result in the surfer closing out of your site and never coming back.  With so many sites at our disposal in today’s world why bother wasting time on one that frustrating to navigate through.  If the surfer needs to hit the refresh button for any reason then your flow has failed.  It’s your job as the website designer to ensure a pleasant experience on your site and there’s nothing more frustrating to someone browsing your site then getting lost in it.  So how do you go about ensuring the surfer has a pleasant experience?  In order to provide a suitable flow you first need to define what it is that your site is providing.

A website can be created for different reasons.  You could be providing information on a topic, you could be selling a product, you could be using it as an online portfolio and the list goes on and on.  In each case you would want the layout to be different.

If your site is providing information then obviously you want all the information easily accessible.  Try to break the information into categories that make sense and make it simple to navigate through these categories.  An informational site will have a wide open path allowing the surfer many different ways to view the info; there won’t be a single path to follow.  Be sure to list all of the categories on each of the pages allowing the surfer to switch from category to category with ease.

If your site is selling a product then you’re going to have a more straight forward single path through the site.  Try to keep the surfer on that path.  If he or she engages in a purchase then try to keep them on that path until the purchase is complete.  Don’t give them the opportunity to break away from the purchase.  A good technique to use would be locking out all of the links on the site while the surfer is engaged in the purchase.  Of course you still want to provide a “Back” button so they can make changes to the purchase.

I’ll finish this off with a technique that I love to see on websites; I call it a “Foot Path” (I’m not sure if it has an actual name).  This is an interactive “path” of the steps the surfer has taken on your site.  Visually it can be represented in many different ways.  The idea is to show the viewer what page they are currently on and the pages they’ve already visited allowing them to click one of the previous pages and be taken back.  Here’s a crude example of what I mean…

Page 1 –> Page 2 –> Page 3 –> Page 4 –> Page 5

So we have pages 1 through 5 displayed, the viewer is clearly on Page 5 and Pages 1 through 4 should link back to those Pages.  If you decide to use this technique then have fun with how you visually represent the “foot path” to the viewer.