In my speeches at conferences and in-house seminars, I talk about 12 common blunders on marketing websites.
Each one of them can impact the effectiveness of your website. One of these blunders occurs with the use of the navigation bar and navigational choices.
The cause of distractions that will greatly depress your results.
Most websites have multiple navigation choices. In other words, they have too many options that distract from the sales message or send the prospect to other pages on the site.
For a general, corporate website, that’s forgivable.
But NOT as part of a lead generation or sales campaign.
Ensuring your #1 goal of closing the sale
Often when I create a sales site or landing page, it will have no navigation bar at all.
It simply starts with the headline and moves prospects down the page to the order form at the bottom with a continuous flow of direct response copy.
Take a look at the landing page I just did for StarShop to raise capital from Accredited Investors:

Note that there are no navigation distractions at all.
In the cases where I do use a navigation bar, I keep it simple, and, if possible, the navigation links prospects to something that is further down the page, again so that they never leave the sales process.
Ask yourself before including a navigation choice:
Is the navigation choice necessary?
Does it interrupt the flow of the sales process instead of helping secure the lead or the sale?
If the answer is “yes”, leave out the navigation bar.
For more information on how to improve the effectiveness of your marketing website, call me at (310) 212-5727 or email me at [email protected].