It is very tempting to try to avoid the same old navigation that everyone has.
Why not think of a funky new name for your HOME page? If you’re a French restaurant, you may be
tempted to call your HOME page ‘LA MAISON’ or ‘CHEZ NOUS’ but it’s much better to avoid this and to stick to the conventions every web-user is familiar with.
If you have a PRESS section on your site, it’s much better to stick with boring old PRESS rather than (as was suggested by a client recently) ‘IN THE LIMELIGHT’.
The chances are that you and I understand the phrase ‘IN THE LIMELIGHT’, and a little thought would tell us that this could possibly be a PRESS page but do we really want viewers to spend time wondering what on earth that link means? And would they bother?
Just as importantly, remember that your site will have viewers who don’t have English as their first language. Even if you are convinced that most of your site visitors will be from America (and you would be surprised - they won’t be) then it might interest you to know that the 2000 census showed that only 82.1% of Americans speak English in their homes.
According to the Census Bureau, in 14 million U.S. households people speak a language other than English. One in five people over age 5 speaks a language other than English. (And I would imagine that these figures have increased since 2000!)
These 14 million people make up a part of your site audience. I have checked with the Spanish- and French-speaking members of our team and IN THE LIMELIGHT would not be understood. The goal is to make it easy for all your site visitors to find the information they are looking for easily and quickly - remember that your competitor’s website is only a click away!
Please remember this when you are writing your website content also. Many years ago, I read a website which said that all they needed to proceed with whatever deal they were offering was the viewer’s ‘John Hancock’. I had no idea what that meant. In our staff meeting this morning, in preparation for writing this document, I asked the TSDG staff if they understood the term. Only one person did. The same thing happened when I said that something should be eighty-sixed. Some phrases are so common to us that we don’t even realize that they wouldn’t be understood - for example, ‘we are available 24/7’ .. you will no doubt find more in your web copy once you start to look for examples.
Remember too to avoid jargon. You need to be sure that your viewers understand what is in each section of your site. For example, you might understand a link which says that you offer SEO, but do your viewers understand that?
If your site is targeted strictly towards your industry, you might get away with industry-specific terms but not if you are selling to people outside that tight circle.
For example, if you were in one of our TSDG staff meetings you might hear us talking about DNS, CMYK, URLs, SERPs, CCS, RGB, PNG, EPS ... and we know exactly what we mean!
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