Make sure your website won't overwhelm

I have been working on my website again. I've been pretty busy so I've left it alone, and the lack of attention has been showing.

One thing I've noticed is that as I added to my website, the list of links on the left navigation bar got very long. It had 15 links on it. That's just too much for the average website visitor to see. If you're lucky, the average site visitor is going to spend a MAXIMUM of 3 seconds on the main page of your site.

If the visitor doesn't see anything that interests him or her, OR they are completely overwhelmed by the choices, they're going to leave. I can't give you the statistics on that, but if you think about your own web-surfing habits, isn't that how you react?

I decided I was going to pare down the list of links. But how, I wondered - "Every one of the links has important stuff on it!"

So I tried to think where some of those links could go, but inside the website and where they would make sense. I realized that Featured Portrait could go on my Portfolio page, and that Choosing Reference Photos and Make A Payment could easily work in the How To Order page.
I also realized that the Links pages didn't need that prime space. That link could go at the very bottom of my website pages.

I reduced the left side navigational links from 15 to 10.

My last piece of advice on this is to keep your website pretty basic. My website has become like a house in which the homeowner kept building on and building on. I really wish I had kept it more basic. It's now more than a bit cluttered. But when it gets cluttered, the easiest "fix" seems to be to rebuild a new website from scratch - however, once you've had your website for awhile, it's better for your rank in the search engines to keep it where it is. So work to keep it basic and organized from the very beginning and you won't be sorry.