Fly-out page navigation – cute – but it doesn’t work all the time for all your visitor types

I’ve seen many navigation styles since 1995 – and one that has particular faults is the “Fly-out” or “Drop-down” style of navigation.

This can also be called “Dynamic Menus” rather than “static” page html navigation links.

These can be powered by JavaScript, DHTML or Flash and typically move aside or down to display other navigation options when the mouse cursor is hovered above the name of the section – but then again some don’t – some have a delay before the fly-out / drop down – and then some don’t…

So that is one reason why they are a bad idea – they all work slightly differently as there is no “standard” way to implement them.

Some of the better ones have indicators when there are subsections available – but lots don’t – I’ve even clicked on what looks like the Main section heading without ever knowing that other pages were available under the selection.

“The menu got in the way of getting me to the information I wanted.”

With no “standard” in place for these you risk alienating your web visitor – and potentially the navigation may be getting in the way of that web visitor finding what he wants from the web site.

Web visitors come in all skill levels – you may have a web visitor to your web site that hasn’t seen many dynamic menus and they may not know how they work – their eye sight may be impaired and so the have the standard text size increased which again the fly out or drop down menus often do not support.

There are two other main reasons why we don’t like Fly-out or Drop Down Menus – speed and search engine optimisation.

Even the smartest JavaScript or DHTML developer has to allow for older browsers – or else the menus won’t work for some visitors and this significantly increases the amount of code required to build the menus on each page.

I’ve seen pages that are huge in file size and take ages to download and ages again to then load & display in the browser – just because of the overhead of having to load and process the menu code. Not good…

I recall a survey that linked a web visitors “trust” and “accuracy” of information on a web page to the time it takes to load a page – the faster loading web pages / sites were judged to be more “trustworthy” – interesting indeed…!

And then there are the non-human visitors to your web site – the search engine robots, spiders and link bots. Many of these do not have the ability to process JavaScript, DHTML or Flash – and so they don’t follow the links to the sub pages within your web site – and so don’t list them in the search engine databases.

A way around this is to have text links also on the pages – at the very least to a site map page or even a special page just set up as search engine bait – but many of the web sites that use Fly out or Drop Down menus do not have such a page.

So this is why our toolset does not support fly out / drop down menus.

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To view or respond to a question, please select the appropriate link. Heading User Date  Drop Down Menus Dallas 21/05/2007 12:51:38 p.m.  good website Grant Alexander 15/09/2006 1:39:05 p.m.  navbars Ross 4/08/2006 1:19:59 a.m.