Website Optimization: An Hour a Day by Rich Page

Author:Rich Page [Page, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
Published: 2012-04-22T14:00:00+00:00

Wednesday: Optimize Your Usage of Navigation Drop-Down or Fly-Out Menus

Websites that have many categories and sub-categories need to offer more than just a standard main navigation menu. If you only have static menus that don’t expand, your visitors will have to click on each category to find the subcategories within them. This can be frustrating and time consuming for them.

Having a website that offers advanced drop-down or fly-out menus that contain links to all subcategories and other important links is a much better experience for visitors. By using these it means they can instantly see what subcategories are under each main category, and it gives them a great quick overview of what your website offers just by moving their mouse on these dynamic menus.

Today you will learn best practices that can help you optimize your drop-downs and fly-out menus so they are more usable for your visitors.

Check How Easy Your Navigation Menus Are to Interact with and for Any Potential Issues

If you have drop-down or left-hand fly-out menus that are designed with poor usability you may frustrate your visitors when they use them, possibly causing them to leave your website. Sometimes they are hard to interact with, scroll over, and even break entirely in some browsers. Therefore you need to check how easy it is to use them and fix any issues you find.

In particular, you should check if your mouse can easily fall off your drop-down or fly-out menu when using it, and also check to see if they get obstructed by other page elements. These are both particularly frustrating to visitors when they occur.

Test Advanced Navigation Menu Functionality

You should also test improving the functionality and usability of your menus by showing larger drop-down or fly-out menu areas that include advanced navigation options. The benefit of these is that you can include more tools and promotions in them than normal menus, which will greatly assist visitor navigation and engagement.

In these advanced menus, you should test showing search boxes that relate to the navigation tab currently rolled over, promotional items or modules, and relevant imagery or icons. The ElectronicArts.com website has a particularly good example of this advanced menu, which can be seen in Figure 5-6. Another example is ESPN.com, which has a great dynamic menu that even includes the ability to include personalized content in it (like favorite team-related content).

These advanced functionality drop-down menus can also help make your website stand out from the crowd of competing websites, and encourage repeat usage.

Figure 5-6: Example of a good advanced drop-down menu

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