Navigation models
I'm looking for some good examples of navigation models particularly on sites which have loads of content.
What's everyones opinion on sites which use a right (3rd) hand column for sub navigation?
Have you seen any sites which use a 2 column layout well where the sub navigation appears in the content area as opposed to the left column?
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Can't think of any off the top of my head. However I must admit to not really liking RHS navigation. Useful links and related documents are fine, but I guess I am now just too used to seeing top and LHS for nav.
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I agree, for me RHS means I have to move my mouse further to navigate, I also would be aware users with screen magnifcation software would have to scroll even further. So where you have lots of sub menu items, what's the option?
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Depends on the level of subnavigation you want. Ones I have seen recently include:
Top nav
Second top nav (changes per area)
LHS Nav - Linked to secondary top nav
That would provide 3 deep, a fourth you could expand to secondary LHS nav for four levels deep.
It depends how confusing you find context sensitive navigation to be.
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I find context sensitive navigation confusing and would argue it goes against checkpoint 13.4 Use navigation mechanisms in a consistent manner. It's for that reason I'm investigating alternatives which work well!
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Hmmm, I am not sure they go against provided they are applied in a logical manner (also I might have my terms mixed up on context sensitive).
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I often do that - primary navigation at the top and secondary navigation down the right or left-hand side. I don't think you can really argue for one or the other - it's a point of style as much as it is usability.
But it's often not as simple as that anyway. On my main site as with many - it goes into tertiary navigation as well, so in that case I went for a horizontal primary nav, a horizontal secondary nav just below it, and groups of tertiary navigation in a right-hand column (which is also switchable to left-hand column via the stylesheet switcher)
What I always get stuck on is what to put for the tertiary navigation's meta heading. With primary and secondary navigation it's easy:
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<h2>Site navigation</h2> <h3>Main areas</h3> <ul> ... </ul> <h3>In this area</h3> <ul> ... </ul> |
But how to describe the tertiary navigation. In the "Scripts" section, for example - the main area is "Resources" and the secondary area is "Scripts", the tertiary areas are individual scripts, and they're in a RHS column of lists grouped by type - but how to describe that column generically?
"Tertiary navigation" doesn't mean much to most people, it's too obtuse - and "In this sub-area" is just confusing, because you can't rely on the term "area" having meaning at this point in the heirarchy, because (since primary content comes before primary navigation, but tertiary navigation is a sub-set of primary content) the tertiary navigation ends up coming *before* the primary navigation - so how to describe that column without drawing on the "area" semantics established in the primary navigation construct.
(By which I mean - the phrase "in this area" is meaningless on its own, because what do you mean by "area"? But if you've introduced it by saying "Site navigation", and it's one of two subsections called "In this area" and "Main areas", then the notion of "area" has been established so you know what the phrases mean)
Am I making any sense?
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I think I get you 
Navigation is to be honest the bugbear of any large site. In one that cropped up a while back (names to be left blank to protect the guilty), we were presented with a site with > 350 inter-related pages with navigation dropping to four deep.
The problem was compounded by the pages being put together without use of CMS or even menu includeds that meant that certain pages on levels of navigation were their for some siblings, but not others. Getting around this navigational nightmare was not easy to say the least!
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It certainly isn't. And dynamic menus don't help in this respect either ... that's another one I struggle with.
I don't mean that dynamic menus harm accessibility, because it's all in how you put it together.
But a dropdown menu is not a sitemap - they generally don't (and shouldn't) contain links to every page - only major sections, subsections, and in some special cases tertiary sections - should be included in dynamic menus, imo.
Perhaps even a sitemap itself should not contain every page - what about Amazon? It would be ridiculous ....
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This is the sort of thing I'm thinking of here, where the subsection links are actually in-page rather in the left nav or right nav. Has anyone seen this done effectively?
in page nav example
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Perhaps you've read this article: Why Primary Navigation Must DieSimon Pieters
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Interesting article, however the conclusion doesn't match the evidence.
All the examples are of badly designed or badly structured navigation, to show that such problems are a major issue to many users, and that's true; but to conclude from that that primary navigation is a bad thing entirely is a logical fallacy - it's like saying that since some cars are badly designed, making them hard to drive or even dangerous, that therefore cars should all be banned.
The real conclusion from those examples is to make sure that your navigation is well designed and structured, and that you describe links in meaningful, unambiguous terms.
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Although we don't have that big a site at the office, we do use an odd-ish navigation.
- The main menu is in the left-hand column. It's essentially static, although the English pages have a different one than the Swedish pages.
- The top menu is for items that are less commonly used, but still good to have access to on all pages (we think): About Us, About the Site, Contact Us.
- The right-hand column contains links that are relevant to the central content column. These links are different from page to page.
Is it a good solution? Probably not. We get quite a few emails from visitors praising the site for being clear, structured and easy to navigate. But we sometimes get irate emails from frustrated customers who find it very confusing. I suspect that those are IE users running at 800x600 with a Favourites bar open, or something similar. Due to the limited CSS2 support in IE, it gets an elastic layout that is not as fluid as that which is served to more modern browsers. It fits into a maximised 800px-wide window, but if there is a sidebar open, the right-hand column is off-screen and there's a horizontal scroll bar.
I think a menu generated by a server-side script, where the subsections would 'expand' dynamically for a selected first-level item, would be better. Unfortunately we were limited to a static menu due to constraints during the design and construction phases.
Tommy has left the building
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Am I alone in having issues with right hand navigation? I think for keyboard users they have to tab more, a user with screen magnification software would have to constantly scroll to the right or scroll more. Even for users with a mouse, perhaps with mobility impairments, surely that would be an issue?
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| Daz wrote: |
| Am I alone in having issues with right hand navigation? I think for keyboard users they have to tab more, a user with screen magnification software would have to constantly scroll to the right or scroll more. Even for users with a mouse, perhaps with mobility impairments, surely that would be an issue? |
But how are any of these issues different with RHS navigation than they are with LHS navigation?
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