Growing up, I loved Schoolhouse Rock. When my kids were born, I was eager to buy them the DVDs so we could learn about conjunctions and adverbs together.

Unfortunately, we don’t watch much Schoolhouse Rock, even though we have a DVD. Do you know why? No, it’s not because the songs are educational but catchy ear worms for children.

Instead, we don’t watch them because the DVD navigation menu is a pain. At three minutes each, the clips are great time fillers. However, sometimes we’d like to just watch those video clips straight through and we…..can’t. Every three minutes, I need to re-select a video from the menu. It’s really annoying especially since we, as a family, are really bad about knowing where our TV remotes are.

So what do we do as a result?

We avoid that DVD altogether. It’s less stressful.

Many small business websites seem to suffer from this same dilemma. They don’t take what their customers want into consideration. They may build beautiful websites with roughly zero information. Or, and this is equally as dangerous, they build a wonderful website and then never update it again. Their potential customers are caught in a loop where they try to buy from you, but they just can’t figure out how. 

An easy way to assess whether your website may be potentially driving people away is to go back to the beginning: your navigation bar. Is it easy for your customers to find what they need? Can they easily understand what they’ll find behind each navigation item? If, for example, you have cute nav bar items like “The Haps” rather than About Us, it’s very possible that some customers will have no idea what they can find under that nav bar item, thus avoiding it altogether.

It’s important that your website pages and nav bar items are easy to understand. Without this, it’s difficult to make your website usable.  And really, if you’re going to use your website to build customer relationships and drive sales, it needs to be usable.

What’s your favorite website?