Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site by Gavin Bell

Author:Gavin Bell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: COMPUTERS / Web / Page Design
ISBN: 9780596518752
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2009-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Providing for Site Navigation

You will need to provide navigation to other sections of your site, too. You can’t rely only on context-led page navigation. Typically, social applications have a horizontal navigation bar at the top of the page, providing key navigation. Often, there is a deep navigation map at the base of the page. Placing frequently used navigation buttons at the top of the page and less used tools at the bottom leaves more space at the top of the page for content. In addition, removing the typical lefthand navigation bar shifts the emphasis from the navigation and branding to the content from the people on the site. We read English from left to right, so a page layout with a navigation menu on the left and ads or other content on the right can give the community content a slightly hemmed-in feeling.

The rise of blogging in the past five years has promoted experimentation in designing clear, simple navigational structures for site. Blogs tend to focus on a time- and category-based design with a clear link to a simple underlying URL structure. There is much to learn from this work. Clearly indicating the content that is core to your site and showing the tools to manage this content is important. Your site navigation needs to be thought through entirely from the point of view of the people using the site. This might seem obvious, but once inside a project, it is easy to lose site of that point and pay attention to the impulse behind “that awesome feature that took months, which has to be included in the navigation.”

The three examples shown in Figure 13-11 demonstrate the following common navigational layouts for websites:

Traditional website

The standard layout has a branding space at the top, content navigation on the left, ad space on the right, and the copyright on the bottom. This layout is very common on many content and product-led websites.

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