An easily overlooked and often underestimated element of all websites is the navigation bar.  It shows up on almost every page of your accounting firm’s web site and clients constantly use it to traverse your CPA web site.

A well-formed navbar can be crucial to determining the visitor’s experience, so here are a few tips to make it complement your accounting firm’s website with CPA Site Solutions rather than complicate it.

A cluttered navigation bar is a lot like a cluttered apartment:  unappealing to the eye, difficult to find what you’re looking for, and visitors aren’t going to want to stay for very long. So it is important that you keep your accounting website’s navbar short and simple.

It may seem like having a link to every page on your site available right on your navbar would make things easier for your clients, but it actually makes things more difficult. A lack of structure and an excessive number of links confuses and frustrates clients and pulls focus away from the pages themselves.

Ideally, your navigation bar shouldn’t have more than 8 initial links.  This number of links on a navbar keeps it from seeming overwhelming and makes it more inviting for people to browse casually.

It also helps to keep the link names concise and generic and leave the specifics for the page itself. “Online Tax Tools for Client Users” is unnecessary when “Tax Tools” serves the same purpose and function.

You can offer more options by making use of sub pages. A main navbar link named “Accounting Services” could break down into several sub pages focusing on different accounting-related features.

This has the dual effect of allowing for more selections without cluttering up the menu and adding structure to the page by grouping like pages together, making it easier to locate specific information.

Don’t overdo it with the number of sub pages or you’ll defeat the whole purpose. You are allowed several layers of sub pages, so you can keep breaking down into small sections, i.e. “Services” can have the sub page “Business Services” which can have it’s own set of sub pages. Once again, organized groups will prevent people from being daunted by the number of pages you offer.

For  more on setting up and using your navigation bar, check out the tutorials on CPA Site Solutions help page.

Have any comments regarding the managing of navigation bars? Let us know, we would love to hear from you.

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