Forex trading is already super confusing to a beginner. The last thing any webmaster wants is to make visitors even more confused while navigating through the forex site. What are ways to create easy navigation? Does well-designed navigation menu help the affiliate conversion?
Forex traders, especially novice traders, may seek for trading tutorials, broker reviews, software details, general trading information, forex daily analysis, trading strategies and other complicated issues encrypted in forex market. Therefore, a key to a successful website is effective and user-friendly navigation, which takes the visitors instantly to the answer they are so desperately looking for.
Below are things you should consider while building menu:
1. Access to Major Pages
Not all traders enter your forex site via homepage. Maybe they found your recent article on “forex trading styles”, or searched for “broker of the month”, or stumbled upon your forex forum. Either way, with correct SEO, visitors may pop from every corner, therefore it is crucial to create a menu which provides an access a main page (and all other main sections of the site) from any inner page.
2. Put Yourself in Their Shoes
Imagine that you don’t know your site inside out. If you cannot completely erase all the beautiful memories of constructing your site, invite a friend to make comments about the navigation. Give yourself (or a friend) tasks, such as “find broker ratings”, or “find tutorial on forex indicators” etc. If the task cannot be completed within several clicks, your navigation needs some work.
3. Sneak-Peek at Competitor Sites
Open up couple of other forex sites and check out their navigation menus. Where is it positioned? How easy is it? Which major sections are listed? Are there any hits to help traders navigate? Is there a sitemap? Is it possible to figure out where you are on any inner page?
4. Navigation Options
There are plenty to choose from and it is up to an affiliate to figure out which type works best with his/her forex site:
· Left-side menu. Quite popular among affiliates, since it supports the basic human instinct of reading from left to right (unless your site is in Hebrew, Arabic or Chinese). With left-side menu, you have to make sure leave enough space to write down the link titles.
· Top menu. This one is my personal favorite since it gives lots of space for the content below. The problem with top menu is that you cannot possibly all the important sections of your site in a horizontal line, therefore without actually looking at sub-categories, at the first glance visitors don’t have a clue what is other information is hidden.
The solution for this hidden treasure hunt is drop-down menus. Under top category, you can list quite a number of sub-links and still keep all that extra space for the content.
· Right-side menu. This is a perfect set-up for websites in languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. The visitors read from right to left and the menu placed on the right is a perfect solution.
5. Graphical Icons and Buttons
It is generally acknowledged that colorful pictures trigger better understanding and recognition, therefore icons and graphical menus are very welcomed. For example, just take a look how attractive this babypips.com tutorial becomes with a little cartoon teacher:
Overall, be creative and plan the navigation from the beginning of your forex affiliate path. The last thing you want is to start changing things when you site is up and running.