Thomas Eibner wrote:
On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 06:05:20PM -0000, Jonathan M. Hollin wrote:
Thomas,
:: I'd also prefer the navbar on the lefthand side.
Navigation is critical to the whole site, I'm sure you'll agree. When I design a website I consider the BIG sites (amazon, yahoo, imdb, etc, etc) and learn from them. They have all evolved their useability criteria over the years based on user testing, public feedback and log analysis. We should all take advantage of the experience and knowledge they've paid for.
Navigation is indeed critical, more so for sites like Amazon that have
a LOT of things they would like for you to be able to see. So I don't
think you can compare the two types of sites like that. I too use a navigation bar on the top of the page for most of the projects I've been
working on. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's the best choice for the
job.
Having the menu on the top, meaning stealing from the valuable top space. Which means that if you have short pages you are doomed to scroll even if the page could fit into one screen. That's probably an important factor, but currently most of the documentation pages are long. Though there will be split version of the docs coming in the future.
What I don't like about the menu on the top is that when you add new items, it may become visually unballanced, whereas the menu on the left is always ballanced, since it's a single column.
On the other hand, if we have nothing on the left side, we can better fit into a single page without horizontal scrolling. But according to the usability experts, it's hard to read long lines, so having the menu on the left size makes the content narrower and easier to read.
Also remember that our menu is relatively big, and if you put two pages side by side (with the menu on the top and on the side) you will probably find out that it's easier to locate the items on the single column menu (left), rather than multicolumn one (top). That's again human's habit, unless you read japanese :)
well I realize that I'm just bragging here, I'll leave to you the experts to decide what's the best way to go.
On unrelated issue, one of the users who wished to remain anonymous have send me this (attached) for the front page. I love this! What do you think?
_____________________________________________________________________ Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ticketmaster.com http://apacheweek.com http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
<<inline: modperl.png>>
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