What's the best way for users to Navigate the site?
My initial thoughts.
Options
- 1. Top tabs
- 2. Side Nav Bar
- 3. In page navigation
other navigation issues
- 4. Breadcrumbs (the line that tells you where you are)
- 5. News and recent items boxes.
User side
I think we need a single predominant method - either Top Tabs or Nav Bar.... at the moment i (Simon) am leaning towards TopTabs?.
The advantage of the way we are doing the site is that there are very few real pages - most content is templates and accessed by user input of a search term.
This means that navigation should be easy and simple and can be achieved through fewer tabs + in-page links, rather than a nav bar - that is rather techy and not very good in terms of EOU (in my humble opinion) for JoeBlogsUser?.
I'd also suggest getting rid of News/Recent items on the user side, and maybe, breadcrumbs.
COMMENTS?
ANDY: to be honest, i currently prefer the old/original mechansim that uses a mixture of top and bottom - why ? - well now i can't get to several areas that i previously could. Once tabs are all in place then it may be okay, but i think it would get too cluttered, thus my preference is for tabs tomark the main areas, and the side bar (left) should mark the sub divisions of the active area... this is pretty startard. My second comment, is regarding the colour scheme, it may just be me (in which case fine) but i don't like the green background and i'd loved to know if people with colour-blindness can actual see the green text on green background. I think we should leave things like colours alone for now, lets sort sturcture and content, fine tuning the styling can come later.
Forge side
I'd put the nav bar back in, but indexed from the /Forge/ directory. Also add in news/recent (maybe),but cut the top tabs down to Home:Forge Home:Search ?
COMMENTS?
