The death of site nav schemes.

Have I gone nuts?

In which I explore the slow, lingering and painful death of navigation systems in web design

Web site nav systems are dead. They are old hat, last century and redundant. In short they are history. And so are the people who produce them.

Have I gone nuts? Bear with me. About 10 years ago guys with pony tails were calling themselves designers and were selling front page generated crap to big companies for big bucks. They had a very easy time. The user community (corporate buyers) had no idea what they were buying. The common language these people evolved to talk to each other was *design*. No mention of content. No mention of findability. No mention of accessibilty. Or cross platform performance. *Design*. That was it. What these guys and their clients fixated on - because they simply did not have the vocabulary for the other stuff - was what things look like. What they did not ask was how well they worked.

Many companies still behave in this way today. What they like are glossy presentations, *visuals*, and paper prints of *designs*. What they really love are meetings.

What these people generally do not enjoy is dialogue. And they particularly do not enjoy dialogue with people who are interested in thinking beyond the positioning of the all important *branding material*. Branding material is certainly important. If it is web branding media. If you do it on the cheap and think that a 400px by 300px logo at 46kb is the way to go you may not get the result you really need. And you might not have any web developers for very long.

Returning to the pony tails. What these guys loved was the unholy trinity. Fancy graphical headers. Intricate navigation systems. And the vehicle to bring it all together - Latin text. Believe it or not there are plenty of these folk about today and many of them are apparently flourishing. I could go off into a secondary rant about Latin text. WTF is it for? If the whole purpose of a web page is to communicate one or more *messages* then what use is latin text as part of that process? And if the purpose of web design is to put the information into an appropriate context and presentational framework then how can any conceivable value be added to the process without any real content at all? But it is worse than that. Because if the *design* was *signed off* 8 weeks ago with no reference to the content or the messages due to be contained therein what do you do when you find that one will not fit into the other? This is a *process* that was consigned to history in most agencies years ago.

Which brings me to my point. Navigation systems. What are they all about? Three level drop downs? Forget it. Ask yourself this. Does a newspaper have a byzantine nav system that lets you read an index of the entire content of the paper that is available on every page.? No. Furthermore you would think these guys had never thought for a moment about why the *home* page (on IIS) is in fact called index.htm on a proper server. And they certainly have not asked themselves what additional functionality the errrrrrrrr sitemap thingy provides and what it could replace. And they have absolutely not ever had to design nav systems for companies - often e-commerce - that have thousands of pages. Because if they had they would appreciate that some type of information and indeed navigation architecture is quite handy.

Now consider the search engines. Suppose our page is about Search Engine Marketing - to mention one example. The first thing the bot sees is a nav system that says *Clients* *About* *Contact* etc. Are those links remotely relevant to the keyword search terms for that page? No they are not. Do they lead to pages related to the Concept Key phrase? No they do not. Are they rich in anchor text and surrounding semantic context? Are they heck. So what do we think they are going to do to our SERPS?

Now here is the really cool bit and it is the death nell to the search engine ranking of many a site. When Google encounters more than one link to another page on one page it disregards them with the exception of the first. So if the first link it finds to your life's work is labeled *Portfolio* for example, is without any anchor text and is in a laundry list then how much weight do you think Google is going to give it? None. At all. Google disregards common content in nav schemes for ranking purposes.

And if you absolutely insist on disregarding all these basic idea then you need to be very creative and clever in implementing the site like the guys at Big Mouth Media. Well it would be clever if the site actually worked on the platforms most commonly used by the people who would appreciate it.

Now consider the information architecture. Supposing it occurs to the developer after a proper appraisal of the SEO and Information Architecture that in order to do justice to his subject he needs let us say - 10 categories or sub sections. But his horizontal nav system inflicted on him by his client and his graphic designer, in a trendy fixed width 800px scheme say; only has room for 6 sub pages. Where do the others go? The navigation needs to reflect and facilitate timely motion through the content. Not to control the production of that content.

Now consider the further utterly ludicrous situation where the content developer feels that he needs 2 columns in the top row, and four in the row below for the content which he needs to present. But the latin text only has one column. Plus the navbar of course.

Finally consider the paramount importance of anchor text. Which is a better link of these two:
*Clients*
or
*How we increased the web traffic for the site of our latest client by over 50% in less than two months just by using organic SEO*

It is a no brainer. Nav systems are out. Informative and compelling secondary content is in. In fact something rather like Andy Rutledge's latest iteration. Enjoy.

PS: For a double whammy put your 3 level drop downs in bright red. Color blind people can't use them very easily at all.