Creating Great Navigation Titles

Planning your menu

Creating good menu navigation titles for a website is a skill that’s often overlooked. 

But it can have a huge impact on how your users see your website. Well-thought out titles make exploring your website easier, and ensures that your audience gets to the right page quicker.

Before titling your pages, you will need a well-thought-out site plan. 

Depending on the type of site you have, you may want to choose one of a few different approaches, including:

• Objects: This splits your menu into themes (eg 'courses', 'student life')
• Audiences: Splitting the menu into audience types (eg 'Students', 'Staff', 'Donors', etc)
• Tasks: This considers what the audiences want to do, and splits the menu up based on their major tasks, such as 'apply', 'donate' and so on
• SEO: This approach finds the most popular tasks users want to complete, and prioritises them in the menu

It is good practice to limit the number of top menu items so that you don’t overwhelm your user. We recommend up to five as best practice, and no more than six. This can vary depending on the length of the page titles.

When you are trying to find the best way to lay out your menu, you should make the most of audience research and analytics, so that you know what each audience is looking for.

You should then think carefully about the steps your user will take to get to where they want to go, and how to make that process simpler and quicker.

One good way to work out if your navigation makes sense is a card sort exercise. Write each page on a single piece of card or post-it note and lay them all out on a table. You can then move the cards into 'categories' and note what feels most intuitive.

You can carry out this exercise with one person or a group. It is often useful to try this with people inside and outside your organisation.

Creating your titles

To create more intuitive titles, consider these top tips.

Keep your titles short

Your user may be looking at your titles on a busy navigation menu, and possibly on smaller screens such as smartphones.

To keep titles short ensures that they know what they mean at a glance. Plus the titles are less likely to be 'chopped off'.

Add keywords in the titles

Your title should include the main keywords that your audience is looking for on that page. This helps with SEO, and also makes the purpose of the page more obvious.

Know what your audience is looking for

Your audience may be searching for a specific term, and it may not be the one you use yourself internally.

Use analytics such as Google Trends to get a sense of the words that your users are searching for.

Choose a primary audience

When deciding what content will appear on a page, it is vital that you consider which audience it is serving, and what you want to help them achieve. The same applies to titles.

Instead of having pages which contain 'everything for everyone', think of what your primary audience is trying to do.

For example, 'Research in your industry' indicates that the page is focused on a business audience. This audience may want to partner with appropriate researchers, rather than a student audience.

User stories can be an effective way to work out what the primary audience and their main tasks are.

Consider ambiguities

A title may mean something to one audience, and something different to another. For example, 'work with us' could be seen as an invitation for businesses to partner with researchers, or for people looking for a job to apply.

Try to minimise these situations by placing titles clearly within an audience-specific section. Or re-phrase titles to make the purpose of the page clearer.

Think of the task

If your page is focused on helping a user complete a task, consider this in your titling.

Titles such as 'Visit an Open Day' or 'Talk to a Student' can feel more compelling, and show what the page is about. If the title feels active, and uses 'doing' words, it also reassures the user they will be able to achieve something on that page.

When these titles show up on search results, it also gives users the sense that their query will be answered directly on this page.

Don’t just split into formats

Think about what audiences want from the pages you create.

It may feel natural to label your pages based on the formats they contain, such as blogs or videos. But people don't go looking for 'videos'. They want a video about what accommodation looks like, or a blog on what life is like on campus.

Create titles based on what the content contains, such as 'Student life blogs' rather than just naming by content type.