While it might seem like a good idea to have an extremely thorough menu for your website visitors to easily navigate your site, you might be surprised to learn this could actually result in pushing them away. 

An overly cluttered navigational menu at the top of your page or in a sidebar could overwhelm your visitors and result in them navigating away from the page.

Therefore, you should make it a priority to simplify your website menu to avoid this clutter. Here are a few tips to help you accomplish this.

• Prioritize your links: Only include the most important pages in your website’s menu. Too many options will quickly overwhelm the viewer, so determine your most important links and have them in your main page navigation. The highest-priority pages for most law firms would be Services, About, Attorneys, Blog and Contact.
• Determine your secondary links: Secondary links should be either in a drop-down menu or in the footer of your website. Examples of secondary links could include individual practice area pages, bios for your attorneys and staff and histories of case results and awards.
• Avoid mega menus: While you can make good use of drop down menus, you should be sure not to let those grow too large as well. The more categories and subcategories you have, the more overwhelming it will be to your users. If your firm has a lot of practice areas, consider using a “bridge” page that identifies and links to all of those practice areas rather than listing each individual one in a menu and nesting them within categories and subcategories.
• Use responsive design: Make sure you optimize all of your menus for mobile devices. Computers, tablets and phones should all get a good display with menus. Menus that get too large or long will likely pose issues on mobile devices.
• Use basic fonts: “Fancy” fonts might fit within your brand, but they won’t read well on a menu. Keep your menu fonts simple and easy to read so people can quickly navigate to the page of their choosing.

Conroy Creative Counsel works with law firms of all types to develop websites that resonate with their client base. For more information about making the most of your menus, contact us today.