I was recently looking at the stats on one of my other Interior Design sites. I noticed that people who came to it tend now to *NOT* visit other pages like they used to. Lowering their engagement with my site and the likelihood of that leading to something more fruitful.
Why?
I think perhaps many of us in our industry have become more sophisticated at getting the information we are looking for. Perhaps we don’t click around as much as we used to. Also, perhaps, the ubiquitous use of clickable text to meaningless or bland URLs on websites has often disappointed many of us.
However what I have found to work better is the careful use of banners for navigation. IE a simple JPEG or GIF file with a meaningful image that prompts a further action.
So: what banner? What GIF or JPEG do you need?
There are a few options and things to consider.
Firstly you need to work out what navigation you are trying to get the visitor to use. Secondly you have to work out what image or text will help that and consider how that can be incorporated onto an image file. Consider also the fit with your site’s aesthetics and general style. For example, this blog has a top-right image on each post; those images vary considerably and so the one you can see on this post is as good as any and, in the case, relevant to the content of this post.
Then you can try and find a suitable image on Google. However we found that was time consuming, probably infringed copyright and also the images were never quite right. In the end we commissioned discountbannerprinting.co.uk to produce a few for us. Sorted.