Design Navigational Menus to Generate More Calls & Contacts

A. Merchandising 101

No matter how it appears to you, nothing about your holiday visit to Department Store will be accidental. Store merchandisers will have planned it months ahead, using charts, mock-ups, and walk-throughs - pausing where you'll pause, saying what they think you'll say.

They know you'll be likely to stop at the table of soft, colorful sweaters nearly blocking the entrance. You'll then move towards the right aisle, where you'll pause to examine a "new item" personal electronics display before walking forward. You'll halt about 100 feet in as you look up at the escalator, making you an easy target for a perfume "spritzer." They've identified and eliminated display "dead spots" and slow-selling merchandise that might stop the spending spree they've planned for you. Multiple alternative entrances and routes for you have been plotted through the store, each one designed to entice you in its own way. You'll probably buy things - it will be hard to resist.

B. Website Merchandising with Navigational Menus

The concept of merchandising works equally well on legal websites. Most website visitors, like shoppers, have limited time and patience. Even ones interested in your services will generally view no more than four pages on your site before leaving. Since not all visitors have identical interests, nor will they all enter your site on the same page, you'll want to develop alternate routes that each entice visitors to become clients, or existing clients to retain you for more services. You'll want to get rid of the "dead spots" that merely look or sound nice because, with only four pages per route, you'll want every page to actively sell your services.

While each law practice and firm is different, here's a general checklist for creating or improving navigational menus - the "shopping routes" through your site - to boost response:

1. Get rid of "dead spots" - pages that just don't sell. They include any:

     Home-page animation / text animation
     Home page full-screen photo-collage
     Mission statement
     Firm history

For the best response, the route should tell a potential client exactly how you can help them and exactly why they should call you first. The pages above all say "blah blah blah" - which is never the correct answer to how or why. If firm politics won't let you remove the latter two items, bury them in a sub-menu in an "employment" or "press" section.    

2. Map out some potential visitor routes and make menus to match.

To encourage visitors to view the pages that will motivate them to contact you, make your main menu and inside-page sub-menu links correspond to information categories that best "sell" your services. Organize top menu links left to right and side menu links top to bottom, in order of importance.

 You can also make small directional menus from text links. For example, at or near the bottom of each page on a route, say, "To learn more about x, please see:" or "For more information, please see:" and then list three other pages in the order you think a visitor would like to view them. You can how this looks at the bottom of this page:

     http://www.kaplanmediation.com

You can also encourage a visitor to go directly to the next logical page in a selling path by putting a small graphic, called a "callout," on the right of the page. An example:

      http://britishcolumbialaw.ca/divorce-overview.htm

    3. Study your visitor statistics, and change your navigation menus
        according to how visitors are using your site.

I use and recommend visitor statistics that will show you what you need to know to do all of the following; they're from ClickTracks.com:

     Eliminate pages that are rarely visited. If you think they're being overlooked, make the menu links to them more prominent and see if this changes things.
     Name menu links with the search phrases that visitors consistently use to arrive at your site. Make sub-menus of pages on different aspects of the same popular topics and watch to see if visitors go to them or come directly to them from search engines. If this approach generates more clients, expand the idea further.
     Make a page that gets a lot of contact form inquiries more prominent on the main navigation bar (move it to the left or top, or make it a different color from the other links) Add a text link or "callout" graphic to it on other pages.
     Eliminate or change pages where visitors consistently leave your site, or try putting prominent links on them that lead the visitor back to your most popular pages.