Website Best Practices for Real Estate Associations in 2022, Part 2: Navigation

In part 1 of this series, we discussed website design best practices for real estate associations. Make sure you check it out here.

When it comes to best practices for your real estate association website, ensuring your site has intuitive navigation is a key component. Your website’s navigation is comprised of the main menu, call-to-action buttons, top utility menu, and footer menu at the bottom of each page.

The user experience should always be top of mind when making decisions on what content to share and where that content should be displayed. Remember, your website is not a brochure, it’s an interactive resource and a representation of your organization. Let’s take a look at some best practices and examples for creating incredible navigation menus on your real estate association’s website.

Table of contents

• Intuitive Navigation

• Navigation Best Practices

• Types of Mega Menus
  • Text-Based
  • Description-Based
  • Advanced/Multi-Layer

Intuitive Navigation

A simple way to create a great user experience for the navigation on your website is to make sure people can easily find what they’re looking for and that the process of finding that information is aesthetically pleasing. Your website’s navigation should reduce any friction and keep your members and consumers happy. Here are some website navigation best practices to keep in mind for your real estate association.

Navigation Best Practices 

• Always use multiple navigation menus on your website including a top, main, and footer menu.
• It’s almost impossible to get all of your content onto a single navigation in a way that makes sense for people when they’re on your site so be sure to incorporate your top utility menu with affiliate links and search; the main menu with all your main content and the footer menu can have some ancillary content as well.  
• Aim for 5 to 8 primary main menu items. Remember, less is more.
• Use mega menus to better organize content, which we will discuss in more detail below.

Types of Mega Menus

A mega menu is an expandable, two-dimensional dropdown menu that allows organizations to display a large amount of content and pages in an organized fashion. There are three types of mega menus that offer a great user experience.

Text-Based

• Text-based mega menus are the right choice for sites that have a lot of content; content gets changed rapidly, and new pages are frequently added. 
• This mega menu option allows people to easily find the information they are searching for. 
• Hers is an example of a text-based mega menu from the Orlando Regional REALTOR® Association’s website.
  
  

 Description-Based

• Description-based mega menus are best for sites with medium/low content volumes and there aren’t frequent changes.
• This type of mega menu helps users understand where they are clicking on the website especially since you can add additional descriptions to the menus and submenus. 
• An example of this can be found on Coastal Carolinas Association of REALTORS®’ website.
  
  

 Advanced/Multi-Layer 

• Advanced/multi-layer mega menus are great to leverage calls-to-action, resource libraries, and complex amounts of content.
• This structure choice organizes content in a very intuitive way. 
• An example of this navigation type can be found on Cape Fear REALTORS®’ website.
  

Planning your website navigation is the crucial first step in building a new website or if you’re making changes to your current site. Take your time when you are curating your navigation categories and remember to keep it simple and concise. 

We hope these real estate association navigation best practices helped inspire you with your digital strategy and website structure. If you’re interested in incorporating any of these navigation menus on your real estate association’s website, be sure to reach out to us and someone from our team will be in contact with you.