Last week I made a major change to my cocktail site. I moved the main navigation from the right to left and reduced the number of navigation links shown by half (to reduce duplication of top bar navigation with side bar navigation and give more space for ads). The before and after is below.
Before on the left and after on the right.
Below is a graph of page views per visitor before during and after the change from Google analytics. Can you spot when I implemented it? It’s the 3rd dot from the right. There was absolutely no change, I even studied the hour I pushed the change and nothing happened.
Sometimes things you think are important, aren’t. I stripped out half the navigation on every page on my site and completely changed the site and still people use the site the same way. I guess the advice is make bold changes, see what happens. Sometime’s it’s good, sometime’s it’s neutral, sometime’s it’s bad but the easiest way to find out is to try it.
My favorite dilbert campaign has something to say on this for internet companies and I reuse this all the time: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-03-16/
te quiero como vecino,vos no?
Posted by: Irma Nicola | December 26, 2009 at 09:42 AM
Interesting cause and effect post. Keep'em coming. I'm curious why you didn't actually link to your cocktail site anywhere in the article.
Posted by: twitter.com/benrequena | October 01, 2009 at 10:37 AM
I agree Dennis but it seems to have had no effect on navigation so I am not worried (minimizing my paper airplane site navigation however will completely change the site links). What this did do is move my ads to the left hand side and move them up 100 pixels... interested to see what happens there
Posted by: alexschultz | September 24, 2009 at 09:12 PM
What impact will it have on your sitelinks...???
This could bring you more, depending on which sitelinks show up.
Posted by: twitter.com/TheNextCorner | September 24, 2009 at 06:59 PM