When doing a review of your institution’s website and you use the hamburger menu (see image above), it’s time to review where you use it and build a better desktop website.

What is a hamburger menu?

A hamburger menu is a stack of three horizontal lines signaling to the user that there are menu selections under it. When the user clicks on the hamburger menu, a full menu appears to navigate your website. We find that hamburger menus are handy and easy to implement with modern web authoring frameworks.

When to use a hamburger menu?

Hamburger menus are best used when part of a mobile website design strategy. Most modern websites have a single version of a website which dynamically changes design based on the width of the web browser viewing the website. As the width of the browser gets narrower, the site will dynamically convert from the “desktop” version of the site to the “tablet” version, then down to the “mobile” version – all depending on how wide the browser is.

The hamburger menu is best used when the browser is at the tablet and mobile widths. On page widths which are for desktop computers, they should rarely be used.

Use Case

Let’s look at typical user of your website: A business owner. Let’s say that business owner is interested in a few business services you offer, and they navigate over to your website on their laptop.

If you have a good menu system, your homepage will display a “business services” menu item directly on the homepage, allowing our business owner to immediately find the treasury management business services you offer and read about the business services you provide your customers.

If you designed the homepage with a hamburger menu on the desktop version of the site, our business owner gets a nice-looking homepage with no obvious navigation. It stops them cold asking themselves “what now”? They must poke around at the site to get to the pages they wanted to see.

It’s All About Usability

This brings us back to the hamburger menu. While it works wonders on the mobile version of your site (I encourage you to use it), it has no place on the desktop version of your site. Your business prospects and customers will use the desktop version of the site most often and making it easy for them to find the right information quickly is important.

If you build a better desktop website, usability goes up and you won’t confuse your potential customers.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.

It’s time to audit your website to verify you have these six must have pages on your website.

Service and Products Landing Pages

I’ve seen far too many community bank and credit union websites lately with combined pages for all service offerings. For instance, if an institution has a page for consumer products, the page simply has a listing of all the consumer products listed on it.

Instead, create a detail page for each product or service under their respective landing pages. Here is an example focusing on business products and services. For clarity, let’s say this institution uses the words “Business Services” to categorize them.

First, we would create what is known as a landing page for “Business Services”. This page would be off the root of the website in the structure as:

/business-services/

Why do we use the entire phrase “business-services” in the URL structure? This is so we can attract search engines with some words which describe the content on this page and all pages underneath it. If the page has “business services” on it, you should use that phrase in the URL structure, the title of the page, the H1 header of the page, in the body of the text on the page, and in the ALT text on any photographs on the page. All of this is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is a critical part of how well your website is indexed by search engines such as Google.

The content of this page should describe the various business services you offer in a table, graphic or some other way to provide links to details about each business service. I have seen everything work from a table of icons to custom graphics. Just make sure it is mobile friendly.

Once you have the landing page built (/business-services/), it is time to start building service detail pages which describe each of your services in detail.

For instance, say you offer a service called “Business Checking”, this service would have a service detail page located at:

/business-services/business-checking/

There are many reasons for creating service detail pages, but the most important of them all is to attract search engines to the page. If someone is searching for business checking accounts and you have a page specifically built for responding to the query “business checking”, it is more likely that a search engine will offer that page in a search result.

Create each service detail page with an eye toward search engine friendliness (see the page tips paragraph above about the URL structure, the title of the page, the H1 header of the page, the body of the text on the page, and the ALT text on any photographs on the page). In addition to these elements of the page, the text on the detail page should be somewhere between 500 and 1500 words – the longer the better.

Here is what your “Business Services” page URL structure should look like”

/business-services/

/business-services/business-checking/

/business-services/business-loans/

/business-services/business-wire-origination/

/business-services/positive-pay/

/business-services/lockbox/

/business-services/business-online-banking/

I think you get the point here. Create a page for each of your services so the search engines know where to find the proper information on your website.

Contact Us

Your site needs a dedicated page for reaching your staff. If you have different contact methods for consumer and business customers, list them on this page. This page should have contact forms, email addresses (if applicable), phone numbers, hours of operation, physical addresses, mailing addresses and any other thing you can add to make contacting your institution easy and friendly.

Privacy Policy

Your site should already have a Privacy Policy page and reviewing it annually should be on your to-do list. Privacy laws change all the time, and you need to keep yours current – especially if you serve any customers in California or the European Union.

Terms & Conditions

This page is necessary to cover terms of doing business with your institution not covered in your privacy policy. Again, it needs to be annually reviewed.

About Us

This page is a great place to showcase your institution’s founding and history. The more detail, photos, and stories you can add to this page, the better.

Location(s)

The reason you need a location page (even if you have only one location) is to make it E-A-S-Y for your customers to find you. The location page should have your addresses, photos of the site and a Google or other map link the site visitor can click on for mapping detail. If you have multiple locations, I recommend building out a /landing-page/detail-page/ structure for each of your locations to help the search engines and your customers find each of your locations.

While this is not an exhaustive listing of everything you need on your website, we feel this core list is a great place to evaluate the six must have pages on your website.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.