Argh = not getting anywhere. And I have to leave for the evening.
Ok, I just spent an hour on the phone with a designer friend. What he convinced me of is that Allan and I were really in agreement. Read on.
Thanks for forwarding these comments Bill!
He does not like the navigation on the left of the content area, nor does he like the search box on the left of the content area. (He doesn't like anything on the left.) The reason is flow: the eye goes to the title, then goes to what's next, and in either case (navigation left or search left) is what's next, instead of the text.
That's only important when you just start using the site. When you are using it all the time, you know exactly what you are looking for and where things are, so it gets less important and compactness becomes more important.
That's exactly the reason I put the search box on the right, and navigation left, but then and removed the lines around the navigation buttons. I was trying to make the navigation less powerful. Have my cake and eat it too, if you will.
IMHO, it's hardly seen. I think we need a concept of a button. Can we use a border which is thinner than what we have? Well, we cannot it's a single px, but look at the prev button in the attachment I've used a lighter shade of grey.
I'm absolutely against removing the border on the [top] button, it gets lost in the text and it must be outstanding.
All in all, the navigation widgets are there for a reason, and if you hide them what's the point in having them in first place?
Here's that again: http://hank.org:5000/test1/docs/index.html
But that's still not enough. Even the light-weight navigation on the left side is in the way to some degree. No getting around that.
Again, the main idea is to make the content flow, from the title to the text.
We tried moving the navigation and search above the title bar. Didn't work.
What if we move the title after the navigation?
Tried placing search above the title on the right, and the nav below title on the right. Didn't work, as the right side was way too heavy.
He suggested since the navigation is related to the current page that the navigation could be *in* the title bar on the right side. But our titles are too long, so the title and nav won't fit on the same line.
My he suggested moving the search to the left-hand sidebar. ("Argh, that's where it just came from", I said.)
In short: We felt that this was the best design:
http://hank.org:5000/test3/docs/index.html
because there was the least amount of stuff blocking the path between the title bar and the content.
You cannot put 'go' next to the input field, did you check NS4? it's f**ked up.
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