Quick-Tips & Best Practices

Navigation menus work well for visitors who already know what they are looking for. But prospective students, one of the most important audiences on the site, tend to browse differently. They arrive on a page, read through the content, and make decisions about where to go next based on what they encounter as they scroll. They are rarely hunting for a specific link in a menu.

On mobile, this behavior is even more pronounced. Traditional navigation is often collapsed behind a menu button that many visitors never tap. Sidebars disappear entirely. What remains is the page content itself -- and if that content does not offer a clear next step, many visitors simply stop.

In-content cards solve this by putting navigation where the visitor already is. Instead of expecting someone to find and open a menu, you surface the most important destinations directly on the page, with enough context to help them choose.

A common and effective approach is to end a section or a page with a row of cards, each one linking to a key subpage. For example, a top-level Admissions page might close with cards for "First-Year Students," "Transfer Students," and "International Students." A department landing page might link out to the program overview, faculty, and advising pages.

This works because:

• Cards are impossible to miss. They sit in the natural scroll path, not tucked into a corner of the interface.
• Cards provide context. A card can carry a headline, a short description, and an image -- enough for a visitor to know whether the destination is relevant before they tap.
• Cards feel intentional. A curated set of three or four cards signals to the visitor that these are the next logical steps, rather than asking them to sort through an entire menu.