Hi
Anyone have ideas or experience of best practice regarding Nav Bar Items.
This nav bar item, is both a button link, and a drop down menu to a list of pages.
We want people to go to the parenting link, but when you mouse over it the other list appear.
I feel this doesn’t really work as well as it might.
Would love to hear any ideas.
Paddy
Do you mean that there is content in Parenting that people might not find because they assume all content is in the dropdowns?
Related article that I just stumbled on when looking for something else
yea have it like https://www.smashingmagazine.com
also, put navbar on the side
if you actually test what % of users actually click on this stuff, you would see how bad it is to be making things needlessly complex
Exactly, looking at the analytics I think we’re missing some visitors. Going to do some user testing and see if we can improve this.
P
I wonder if the site could benefit from better hierarchy mapping within your navigation. Clicking through the site, location with the site hierarchy is difficult to track, and not all pages are represented in the menu structure or show as properly represented to their parent navigation category. Things get fairly problematic in the lower levels of the “About Us” section and the individual product offerings.
Personally, I’d switch to a more mega-menu style, and represent more of the lower-level pages. I’d also consider adding breadcrumbs to the page to aid in hierarchy context and navigation.
analytics and visitors has to do with other things
but specific to website design, and specific to clean design
if whoever is making this site, well im not which template they’re using, but if they can actually make this a clean site and then post it
that would be great
the majority of the websites out there is just unbelievable
and they negatively affect my life and well-being because of how badly designed they are
Just make sure it makes sense on touch devices as well - as you can’t rely on hover.
I tend to think if it needs to have a drop down only make it behave as a drop down.
If it’s a direct link only make it do that.
This keeps the expected action clear to the user.
This would make sense if Parenting was an overarching category, and the drop down showed the various parts of the category. I would still have a /parenting page to reach from breadcrumb SEO that became a landing page to point to the various parts of the category.
It sounds like this is completely different than how you use your Parenting page and it’s not always clear how users should access it.
Only tangentially related, but the hover control may be coming to touch screens/mobile devices eventually. The hardware already exists, it’s just matter of whether or not mobile device manufacturers decide to adopt it or not.
Good to know!