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Aug 08.2003

layout navigation and menu bars.

what sort of menu pisses you off the most?

do you think menubars are better off on the side or along the top?

do you think the x/y arrangement of menubars is good thing? -where the menu on the x-axis is the main topic and the menu on the y-axis are the subtopics (or visa versa)

DHTML gifs or text/css? -which of these do you think are better for menus?

I really wanted to gahter opinions on this just so I know which would be the most effective for my use.

Thanks Neil

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6 Comments(s) ↴

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@pyroAug 08.2003 — A lot of your questions are just asthetic choices, and can often times be dependent on the site. But, when making a menu/navigation system, you need be sure that it is accessable. Do not make a javascript dependent menu, unless you have a plan (or better, impliment a plan ? ) to keep the menu working for the 13% of users who have javascript disabled. The nice foldout menu that you just got done making is going to mean nothing to the people who will not be able to navigate your site because you use it...
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@DariaAug 08.2003 — I agree that it is a metter of functionality. It's got to work. Period. Non-working menus p*ss me off. Personally I don't like "floating" menues that move with your mouse. It may be cool for the first 0.0000452 seconds, after that it's plain annoying to me.

I like css layouts. In my practice clients prefer image rollovers. They all love them with sugar on top.
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@toicontienAug 08.2003 — [b]X vs. Y menus[/b]

I like horizontal menus near the top of the page. It keeps with the same navigational philosophy of most operating systems: menus are located at the top of the window.

However...

I can only stand horizontal menus if there are six or fewer menu items. After that, things just start to look cluttered and you could run into problems where the menu looks like an obscenely long line of text. And people don't like long lines of anything. Secondly, users with a 640 X 480 screen may need to scroll sideways to view all the menu items (not good).

Mainly, if it doesn't fit into a 640 X 480 screen, I'll change the horizontal menu to a vertical menu.

[b]CSS vs Rollovers[/b]

Asthetically, I like the look of rollovers better. You can make graphics much more appealling than text. That goes for any medium. As a designer, I like CSS best. You can get some rollover-like affects without the extra load-time of multiple images for each menu item.

On most professional, high-traffic sites I've seen, rollovers are only used for a handfull of menu items, maybe four at the most. Those four links may be the four top-level sections of a large site, and every other nav link is CSS and text.

As long as JavaScript isn't used to display the menu, I say use it any way you want to. Just make sure if you've got a slide-out menu of some sort that you have the menu item link to a page with the same links that would normally pop out if the user had JavaScript turned on.
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@neilauthorOct 13.2003 — thanks for the opinions guys

I think I'm gonna steer clear from js menus, i didn't realise how many users didn't have it enabled.

I've decided to go for a vertical menu in the redisign as there's a fair bit of content I want to link to from the home page and the links wouldn't fit in a horizontal menu set up without some kind of wrap around.

Cheers Neil
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@Sux0rZh_jc0rzOct 13.2003 — personally I like the horizontal menu at the top with the main topics then the vertical menu on the left side of the page that contains subtopics specific to each page. This also allows you to set different colors over the navigation parts of the page then have the content on a page where the color is white or light blue, ect.
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@spufiOct 13.2003 — Another aspect of a image rollover menu is what if the person viewing the site isn't able to see the images? I have seen a number of sites not use the alt attribute and thus their neat looking menu is rendered useless if images are not displayed.

My site currently uses a horizontal menu bar, but I'm reworking the site so it has a vertical menu. Here's one thing I'm picking up on horizontal vs. vertical menus. A major plus to a horizontal menu is ease of updating links. If you have just a few links in your menu that go to your sections, you then can display all the links in that section on one page. Now, if you have a vertical menu and you display all of your links on every page, managing them can be a royal pain. I know using server side code does help in this, but if your site uses a number of sub folders to help organize things, it's still won't be as easy as a horizontal menu with having the links of a section all on one page.
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