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Merrick, NY—In a world where mavericks often reign, you might not believe that sometimes it pays to play by the rules. The rules, in this case, are those of basic website design. One of the most basic tenets of building a website is labeling your various website sections or pages, collectively called your navigation. There's rarely a person that can't think of a more fun and clever way to say 'about us' or 'contact us,'especially if the way you'd prefer to label your pages ties directly in with your current branding.

Not so fast. There are some really good reasons why you should not try to be too clever when you are designing how your site will be navigated. First, your visitors and potential customers know to look for certain pages on any website--such as "contact us" when they want to contact you, or "our locations" if they want to know where your store is and what its hours are. If they don't find what they are looking for easily and quickly, you risk that they will move on to the next website or the next search result. While you're at it, be sure your "contact us" page offers an option to get in touch with you right away, beyond just filling out a form for a return email. Be sure to list your phone number and a street address, both there and on your "our locations" page if you have one of those as well. In this case, better to seem repetitive with the information than not include it at all, because most people who take the trouble to look for your contact information want to talk to you now, not whenever you get around to answering webmail.

Second, avoiding a complex or unusual URL structure will improve your search engine rankings. Obviously, you want your store to come up as high as possible on a search, so make sure all elements of your site are geared to push your ranking up. Most people rarely even go to the second page of listings, so being on page one is critical and the higher up you are, the better chance people will click on your site. See more SEO (search engine optimization) tips here.

Remember that time-honored exercise of walking in the front door of your store to look at everything with the eyes of your customer? The purpose was to put you in your customer's place and perceive your business the way they do. So do that with your website. Take a fresh look and see if your website navigation is the norm....not the creative. Save the creative for your images and the copy on your website pages.

Your reward for standard navigation will be more visitors and better search results placement. Not bad for a fresh look at a an everyday communication tool. For more information about additional pages/names/functionality, here's a great recent article from Matthew Perosi of JWAG.