How Navigating a Website is Like a Choose Your Own Adventure Novel

You couldn’t read a book in the 1980s or 90s without stumbling upon a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. A thrilling series of young-adult fictions that twist and turn until a final act based entirely on your actions is what readers used to crave.

And navigating a website is eerily similar.

First, your novel would start with a central idea and purpose, setting the stage for future endeavors. Your business’ homepage operates in the same way. It’s an informative baseline of theme layout and engaging copy, albeit with slightly more realized imagery. You cannot begin to choose your own adventure without first enticing the reader to move forward.

Smaller sites are at a natural disadvantage due to a lack of pages. Organizations may pack these sites with quality content, but their overall stories are no doubt shorter, which could diminish their search engine status. Larger sites, such as those with regular blog postings, fare better in search results and viewership time if optimized correctly.

Knowing where to start and how long of a ride you’ll be in for are both significant first steps to your web adventure. The next step is to choose where to go from there. There are numerous link options to travel to from the home page. About pages, portfolios, product categories and blogs are standards, as well as team and contact pages.

While more focused than the home page, these new options are merely extensions of the same general idea as your homepage. The first choice is often a slow-pitched softball. Nothing wild happens to the plot. Sure, you’re moving in a more noticeable direction, but the essential elements are still present. And then you hit a full stop. Plots thicken.

 

Time to Choose Your Own Adventure

Choose your own adventure like the red haired woman reading a map.

For e-commerce sites, this could be the difference in product categories or the products themselves. You must choose an option to buy, or at the very least spend more time on one product’s page than another. For a site like Valorous Circle, this can be the choice between one of our blogs.

Any decision will lead you down a path meant to teach you more about some aspects of the site. Any blog on our website informs you on specific topics about social media marketing, digital trends and generational research. Each subsequent blog further explains these issues by linking to older articles on ‘choosing the right keywords for SEO’ or ‘what sports marketers do.’

The ability to choose your own adventure in books and websites is what makes learning about new things fun and exciting. You buy the book because you know the author wants to thrill you – by mysterious forces or science fiction fantasies. You do the same when viewing websites – to be wowed. The author’s clear choice, however, is to have you buy the product or retain the service.

 

Discover more Valorous Circle blogs below to continue choosing your own website adventure.

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