do they slot in? Or you remove three—where do the spaces come in? What happens if a new category name is dramatically longer or shorter than the original set? Panic sets in as the website degrades from “professional” to “amateur”. My best advice is to left-align them and fit the menu highlight to the width of the category name. And allow for a content- managed area where you can add some static links if you reduce the number of categories. In Magento this is easy as categories in the navigation need not have products in them. Dealing with the folk who want some
inspiration, ideas or good-old-fashioned deals, should be managed using conventional merchandising concepts. The “sale” and “new “ categories always get a lot of clicks and account for a big share of the clicks from your homepage. Make these categories in the same way as you would create “garden” or “kitchen” and give them prominence. Other categorisation techniques that work well are “customer favourites”, “best sellers”, “editor’s picks” and so on. What other people do or recommend can help a new visitor self-select—it acts as a psychological draw and defines you in the visitor’s mind. Again, these can be built into the conventional navigation framework quite easily and they can have their own subcategorisation. Apart from the top navigation, ecommerce
websites also offer left-hand navigation and large content areas usually populated by product
Left-hand navigation works well with larger numbers of categories
photographs or merchandising images. Left-hand navigation is usually preferred on homepages where the number of top-level categories exceeds what can elegantly be displayed across the top—six to 10 categories, as above. Nowadays, left-hand navigation tends to come into play once the visitor is in the site on category pages. Right-hand navigation is a bit of a no-no in any event. Directional navigation is usually driven by
content areas that promote special offers and featured products—with a good reason and incentive to get the click. Most ecommerce websites have reasonable facilities for managing
For more ecommerce tips, turn to page 18 for Amy Africa’s 10 must-haves for every website
these in-house, provided such areas are included in the website’s layout. More sophisticated lists of featured products can be showcased in galleries or carousels (scrolling lists), either for purchase directly or for click-through. Typically these are populated through custom categories. In part two we will move further beyond the homepage.
Roger Willcocks is a director of Screen Pages, an ecommerce services agency.
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