All sorts of rules about web design and search engine optimisation abound. Often, when they were written, they made sense. But whereas good designers and SEO experts have moved with the times and thrown out old rules that no longer apply, their clients are another matter: many believe things they read six years ago (or at least, in an article written six years ago) to be gospel truth.

The first thing that should be obvious is that very few rules apply in every situation. Most rules are really rules of thumb. It's quite possible for a good site design to be marred by the insistence on sticking to a rule which simply doesn't apply in that case. But some of the rules circulating are not even good as rules of thumb, and luckily for us, they're often ones which are quite difficult to apply.

The Three Click Rule

According to this rule, you should be able to reach any page on your website in three clicks or fewer. Allegedly, this is because, if people haven't found what they are looking for within three clicks, they give up and go elsewhere.

Firstly, the rule is ambiguous and confusing. Does that mean within three clicks of the homepage, or from any page? It's quite possible that your site visitors will arrive at an internal page of your site via a search engine.

Secondly, studies show that, in fact, people don't give up and try another website if they have to click more than three times. Actually, they're quite likely to keep clicking until they find what they want.

Thirdly, how many clicks are "reasonable" depends on the context. If, on a shopping website, it takes more than two or three clicks to find the orders page, that is bad web design. People are not going to spend much time finding out how to give you their money! Therefore, they're likely to go elsewhere rather than hunt around for your orders page.

If, however, your site has a huge amount of free content in the form of information, such as news reports, editorials and so on, people will be much more forgiving, and willing to hunt around for what they want. You're providing them with a free service, so they won't mind so much if they have to look harder to find the information they need.

This leads us to the fourth and most important problem with the rule: it misses the point. As with most "rules" of web design, it is a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at simplifying a complex problem. The question is not of how many clicks it takes to reach this or that page, but of the usability of the website's navigation.

Having every page your website available within three clicks (or even just one) is worthless if your navigation system is too obscure for your visitors to follow. Links need to be clearly labelled, and it needs to be obvious that they are links. (Trendy designs where link text is just slightly darker than ordinary text, and not underlined, will do far more harm than good.) Your visitors will hang around far longer if they feel like they are getting somewhere. So it takes them four clicks to find what they want – so what? If they got there by a logical route, and they're satisfied with the results, it doesn't matter.

Navigation redundancy is also useful. Give your visitors options so that they can find things their way. If you can, provide menus with your main categories, breadcrumb trails, a well-laid-out site map, and a search bar that works. Your visitors will be less frustrated if they can find things in their favourite way.

The Scrolling Rule

It is claimed that internet users don't scroll down pages, so you need to make sure everything fits "above the fold" (i.e. in one screen, without scrolling). This might have been true a decade or so ago, but it simply isn't the case now. Most people using the internet these days have used a computer enough in other areas to know that you have to scroll down sometimes.

Of course, it depends on your content. Sometimes there's value in splitting up the content of an article (for example, it might deal with two very distinct topics and you could therefore split it neatly down the middle). Most of the time, however, your visitors would rather just scroll gently down your page while reading what you have to say, rather than having their flow interrupted by having to click a link after every paragraph to see the next page.

If you have a long page with lots of information on it, you can help your visitors out by providing links at the top which "jump" to each heading or subheading of the page (as Wikipedia does). This also means that if they want to share a part of your article with someone else, they can send them a link to that section, but the newcomer will have no problem reading the rest of the article too.

It Must be Easy to Learn How to Use the Site

The problem with a site (or anything else) being easy to learn is that it becomes increasingly frustrating to use for people who are familiar with it. Think how quickly you turned off the talking paperclip in Word. If you'd never used Word before, it might have been useful for the first few times you launched the software. However, very quickly, its obsequious tappings probably became a bore at best, and at worst, a source of intense irritation.

The same goes for your website. If you treat your visitors as moronic and incapable of coping with a reasonably logical navigation system, they will quickly become frustrated with your site when they've used it more than once. This particularly applies to sites which include some sort of online service, such as blogging or photo storage sites. Usually, it is better to be logical and simple than it is to be easy.

Exceptions will occur. If you are running a site to which you expect visitors to return rarely, or only one or two times, easy-to-learn interfaces might be worth considering. But if you want returning users to enjoy your site, consider having a learning mode and a pro mode, if appropriate. Think not only about your new visitors, but your returning ones as well.

SEO = META Tags

META tags (additional pieces of information added to a web page which are not directly seen by the user) used to be important. Once upon a time, search engines took serious notice of meta tags when they indexed web pages. But of course, this was open to abuse, because META tags are chosen by webmasters, and they quickly cottoned on to the idea of putting lots of popular keywords in the META tags which were unrelated to their web pages.

Because of this abuse, META tags hold very little weight today. The title tag is the most significant nowadays, because it is seen by the users, so search engines assume that you'll make it something relevant. You can be absolutely sure, however, that "just tweaking the META tags", as so many hapless SEO experts are asked to do, will not noticeably boost your search engine ranking.

SEO = Lots of Links

There is some truth in the claim that more links into your website means a higher page rank. However, again, this is an oversimplification: it is not merely quantity which matters, but quality.

The more relevant the pages are which link to your website, the more those links are worth in terms of boosting your page rank. So if you're a florist, and you get a link from a wedding caterer's site, that's far more relevant (and therefore, far more valuable) than a link from a website about ostrich farms.

Also, the fewer external links there are on the referring page, the better. A link from a page with just two other links to external sites is more valuable than a link from a "link farm" with hundreds of links to random websites.

Conclusion

Whenever you hear someone expounding some rule of web design or search engine optimisation, remember to take it with a pinch of salt. No set of rules will make your website perfect or instantly make it come top in a search for competitive keywords. You should be considering the needs and interests of YOUR visitors. Websites should and do differ from one another, depending on their target audience.

By Brian Jackson

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