I feel like I explain this all too often:  your website visitors have certain expectations when they visit your website.

They’re going to look for a “Log In” link in the upper right corner.

They’re going to try to get in touch using a “Contact” page.

Sticking to expected navigational and architectural structures on your website – especially when you’ve got a lot of content or a complex hierarchy – helps establish trust with your visitors.

Rules, boundaries, roadmaps, breadcrumbs, met expectations - all serve to help your visitors feel comfortable to explore even farther, to dig deeper and keep clicking.   Just like fences encourage kids to explore the full expanse of playground, visitors want to know that your site meets their predetermined website schema so they can feel comfortable pushing the boundaries.

The breadcrumbs, the visual cues that fit expectations, the comfort in navigation serve as reminder that they are safe from harm (“the unknown”). As long as they remain in that secure environment, they can confidently and freely enjoy themselves.

One errant click that lands them somewhere they didn’t expect – or worse, leaves them without a clear path back to from where they came – and you’ve lost their trust.

Straight from the research on website schema’s by Bellman & Rositer, “ease of navigating the website strongly influences attitude toward the site, which in turn increases the strength of beliefs about the new brand’s attributes and also, fairly independently, overall attitude toward the brand.”

Can you think of a time when you visited a website that didn’t meet your expectations and how that made you feel about the company, brand or product?