Image Based Site Navigation – There’s a Reason People Don’t Use It


Sure, image based navigation can look pretty. You can have all kinds of fancy mouse over effects, and really blend the images in with your site design. There’s a reason why you don’t see fancy image navigation on major websites though: it just doesn’t work as well as good old text links.

There are a number of reasons for this. A major part of it has to do with how web users are essentially trained to see blue underlined text as a link. Something that isn’t underlined and blue is all too easily written off as just another cute graphic on the site, and not way to move through the website. 메이저사이트

The other reason for image navigation being ineffective is the still-prevalent dial up connection. It’s surprising how many people still use dial up connections, and image navigation severely detracts from their experience of the site.

Finally, search engines don’t see the text in an image. Sure, you can use the alternate text attribute in the image, but that isn’t weighed anywhere near as heavily as the anchor text in a text link. Using image navigation causes the search engines to see your site as being not well internally linked, which can hurt your rankings.

The same applies for flash navigation, and JavaScript drop-down navigation. It might be pretty, but it’s another thing that could end up not working for some of your visitors, costing you viewership and, if you run a sales site, money.

 


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