Best structure for a news website including main menu nav

[sam_legmark]

Just looking for thoughts and opinions on the best way to set up the main nav on a news website that covers a specific professional services sector.

There are news items, archived news, blog, events, but also main menu links to the numerous news categories that go to a page listing the news articles under that category (as created in Wordpress when publishing the article).

I'm thinking that having these off the main nav is diluting the juice to the more important pages including the events and the news page?

Just thinking about how to rearrange and consolidate.  Any thoughts on how people would structure something like this?

[effectdigital]

This is a pretty good question and the answer can be variable depending upon the level of authority which your domain has currently accrued.

One of our employees always touts this site (not one of our clients) as having superb navigation:

• https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/

There are several aspects to the navigation and URL structure - and how those different elements interact.

Even the faceted navigation impacts the URL structure, for example you can build very specific (niche) URLs like this just using the on-site UI:

• https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/multiple-car-experiences/yorkshire-and-humber/100-250/4-stars

So if you wanted to see driving 'experience days' for multi-car experiences (drive more than one car) within Yorkshire and Humber, which were between £100 and £250 with a 4-star or higher rating... the pages listed there would be the ones!

If you load that page, you can see that all of those things have been set in the sidebar based filtering (faceted) navigation. WordPress has issues in terms of reflecting faceted navigational choices properly in the URL structure, especially when more than faceted navigation filter is active. You then have to choose between pretty permalinks  or having multiple filters accessible to users simultaneously, not ideal. Due to that I'm pretty sure some kind of bespoke (or heavily customised) CMS would have been used to get everything all working in one place as it should.

In addition to all that neat stuff, if you hover over the top menu entries you'll see that they expand and are pretty comprehensive. That's called a 'mega' menu and re-distributes SEO authority very efficiently, so long as all of the links are accessible in the 'base' (non-modified) source code. Surely this is just the way to go for everyone right?

WRONG!

The cited website obviously has the backing of Virgin and some pretty colossal promotional activity going on behind the scenes. That's not insider info, Virgin is a huge multinational corporation! Anyone examining their backlink profile using publicly available data would say the same thing.

If you're not already riding a very high SEO authority stream, chances are that this type of navigation could actually lower your ranking results.

If you have loads of authority, you can tip it down channels to really soak up a lot of long-tail traffic with this very granular type of site-architecture which leverages great navigational/URL-structure interplay.

On the other hand, if you are a smaller site (of any description) - it's like using an irrigation system with only one bucket of water to supply it. That bucket could have kept 2-3 plants alive for a few days, but spread evenly among hundreds of crops it makes literally no difference (and everything dies together, oh no!)

Implementing very advanced navigational structures too early can sometimes cause your small amount of SEO authority to 'bleed out' and achieve relatively little (or nothing) over thousands of pages.

It's great to be ambitious, and all of these great tactics can work (on any site, not just news or experience-day sites) but they all have a proper time of adoption. Adopt too early and you risk flattening your prior achievements in a void of poor results. Adopt too late and you risk being left behind as your peers take a chance and (potentially) make something more of themselves

It's not just what you do, it's when you do it (if that makes sense)

On a news site, or any other site - I'd say start simpler and as you accrue more SEO authority, redistribute it and gradually increase depth of navigation, URL structure and content granularity

Here is your basic decision:

1. Flatter URL structure and condensed nav helps the site build up authority and win a few mid-to-high tier terms
2. Deeper URL structure with expansive nav helps reap the long-tail and gain massive amounts of traffic, but only once your SEO authority reaches a certain threshold. Before that point, you'll just bleed out

Hope that helps

[sam_legmark]

Thanks - very detailed response and much appreciated.

This news site currently gets 40,000-50,000 users per month so there's already some good traffic numbers coming through.

The difference with this and the virgin structure is that all those pages lower down the URL structure will continue to be relevant for that site.  Most of the users coming to this site are finding the latest news articles or know the brand already (direct traffic).

I think that it would be best to put all the different categories as a list on a 'news categories' page rather than have them all listed out on the main nav and distracting from the main areas of 'latest news' and 'events'.

Definitely food for thought there though.  Fingers crossed it works!

[effectdigital]

Not a problem, I always try to give a solid answer

Maybe you could do a compromise and have a "categories" entry that breaks down into the main categories (but not all of them) or something like that. Always remember, you can hedge your bets to test a bit!

Having every news category in the top-line nav, breaking down into sub categories could be excessive. It's a shame that triple-expansion nav never caught on (then you could have categoires->category->sub-category on hover). Whilst that is technically feasible, it's not really very user friendly (at all) as it makes menus really jumpy and dysfunctional (in most instances anyway)

On lots of eCommerce sites now I notice that they have auto-completing product (or category) based pseudo-search bars. Like you'll type a bit of a word, and all the relevant products will come back and you click on one (instead of 'entering' the search, and seeing a page of results). Maybe you could innovate and create a similar thing for news stuff. Have people type a bit of a category (or tag / topic) and then pre-fill with a couple of categories and a load of articles (or something like that)

Just throwing out ideas. Not that yours is bad! Just always trying to think "how could this be more?"