Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Mega Menu Navigation Best Practice
-
First off, I'm a landscape/nature/travel photographer. I mainly sell prints of my work. I'm in the process of redesigning my website, and I'm trying to decide whether to keep the navigation extremely simple or leave the drop-down menu for galleries. Currently, my navigation is something like this:
Galleries
> Gallery for State or Country (example: California)
> Sub-region in State or Country (example: San Francisco)
Blog
Prints
About
ContactSelling prints is the top priority of the website, as that's what runs the business. I have lots of blog content, and I'm starting to build some good travel advice, etc. but in reality, the galleries, which then filter down to individual pages for each photo with a cart system, are the most important.
What I'm struggling to decide is whether to leave the sort of "mega menu" for the galleries, or to do away with them, and have the user go to the overall galleries page to navigate further into the site. Leaving the mega menu intact, the galleries page becomes a lot less important, and takes out a step to get to the shopping cart. However, I'm wondering if the amount of galleries in the drop down menu is giving TOO many choices up front as well.
I also wonder how changing this will affect search. Any thoughts on which is better or is it really just a matter of preference?
-
Hey thanks for the answer! And thanks for the kind comments!
Maybe I should leave the navigation alone then. Some of my thought to go to a solid top bar was to remove any need for JavaScript, but I have always liked having the navigation sit in the corner so that the photos take center stage.
I've wanted to do a search for a while, but just haven't had the time to get to it. Maybe I'll put my efforts into that and cleaning up some of my code rather than a full redesign.
Thanks for the advice!
-
First of all having looked at your site, may I say "Amazing photos", I partake in a few shots myself but mainly motorsport.
Having looked over the site your menu from first glance appears great to me both from a well structured source code point of view, but also from a usability perspective. I found it nice to be able to drill down into any particular section that I happened to be interested in and I think that's the main point. Let the users get as far as they can without having barriers in the way, having to go via multiple pages rather than using your already good/quick menu would make it a more problematic when moving around your site which could in turn increase exits.
You could maybe implement a search facility to enable your users to filter the images based on a variety of categories, e.g. landscape/colour/topic etc
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
The main navigation is using JS, will this have a negative impact on SEO?
Hi mozzers, We just redesigned our homepage and discovered that our main nav is using JS and when disabling JS, no main nav links was showing up. Is this still considered bad practice for SEO? https://cl.ly/14ccf2509478 thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19861 -
Best SEO Strategy for Badges & Awards.
Hello Moz Friends! I was wondering what the correct "SEO friendly" strategy is with badges and awards. We recently got BBB accredited and added their badge to the footer of the website. We also added a review badge from shopper approved to the footer. As I'm joining other communities, I see there's badges given to us. For example, Alignable. Great place for networking. They offer a badge that says "locals recommend us" or something. Should I embed these badges onto our website someplace? Should I create a page for just badges or place them in the footer or sidebar widgets? What the best SEO practice for this? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE2 -
Best Practices for Converting PDFs to HTML
We're working with a client who gets about 80% of their organic, inbound search traffic from links to PDF files on their site. Obviously, this isn't ideal, because someone who just downloads a PDF file directly from a Google query is unlikely to interact with the site in any other way. I'm looking to develop a plan to convert those PDF files to HTML content, and try to get at least some of those visitors to convert into subscribers. What's the best way to go about this? My plan so far is: Develop HTML landing pages for each of the popular PDFs, with the content from the PDF, as well as the option to download the PDF with an email signup. Gradually implement 301 redirects for the existing PDFs, and see what that does to our inbound SEO traffic. I don't want to create a dip in traffic, although our current "direct to inbound" traffic is largely useless. Are their things I should watch out for? Will I get penalized by Google for redirecting a PDF to HTML content? Other things I should be aware of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atourgates0 -
Best-practice URL structures with multiple filter combinations
Hello, We're putting together a large piece of content that will have some interactive filtering elements. There are two types of filters, topics and object types. The architecture under the hood constrains us so that everything needs to be in URL parameters. If someone selects a single filter, this can look pretty clean: www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc
or
www.domain.com/project?object=typeOne The problems arise when people select multiple topics, potentially across two different filter types: www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic-secondTopic-thirdTopic&object=typeOne-typeTwo I've raised concerns around the structure in general, but it seems to be too late at this point so now I'm scratching my head thinking of how best to get these indexed. I have two main concerns: A ton of near-duplicate content and hundreds of URLs being created and indexed with various filter combinations added Over-reacting to the first point above and over-canonicalizing/no-indexing combination pages to the detriment of the content as a whole Would the best approach be to index each single topic filter individually, and canonicalize any combinations to the 'view all' page? I don't have much experience with e-commerce SEO (which this problem seems to have the most in common with) so any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!0 -
What is the best way to find related forums in your industry?
Hi Guys, Just wondering what is the best way to find forums in your industry?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may2 -
Domain Name Change - Best Practices?
Good day guys, We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain. However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website). It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties. Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Best Practice for Inter-Linking to CCTLD brand domains
Team, I am wondering what people recommend as best SEO practice to inter-link to language specific brand domains e.g. : amazon.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro
amazon.de
amazon.fr
amazon.it Currently I have 18 CCTLDs for one brand in different languages (no DC). I am linking from each content page to each other language domain, providing a link to the equivalent content in a separate language on a different CCTLD doamin. However, with Google's discouragement of site-wide links I am reviewing this practice. I am tending towards making the language redirects on each page javascript driven and to start linking only from my home page to the other pages with optimized link titles. Anyone having any thoughts/opinions on this topic they are open to sharing? /Thomas0 -
Best way to merge 2 ecommerce sites
Our Client owns two ecommerce websites. Website A sells 20 related brands. Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google. Website B was purchased from a competitor. It has 1 brand (also sold on site A). Search results are normally high on the first page of google. Client wants to consider merging the two sites. We are looking at options. Option 1: Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A. Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A Option 4: ??? Any thoughts on this would be great. We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EugeneF0