My website - any comments?

Get some feedback on your site or ad from other rental owners and techies. Also a library of online resources so you can make DIY improvements to your web presence.
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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

Mmm....must remember to do it on my own site....

MG
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greenfrog
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Post by greenfrog »

Garri wrote: the overwhelming majority of modern websites these days have their main nav on the right.
Really? I hadn't noticed, I confess. And a quick look shows lots with menus on both sides, which makes more sense to me than just on the right. Mind you, I'm not a web designer so I speak strictly as an end user with experience of paper editing.

Wasn't there an eye movement experiment that found people focus first on the top left corner of a website, then move roughly left to right across the page? I think it was on news sites but still.

MG - I find it a pain having to move the pointer all over the page as most have so many different areas demanding clicking! I can see how it might make sense but I think my reading of a website would be determined by my visual senses. I think... (I hadn't even thought about any of this until this thread!! :lol: We're getting very theoretical about it all!!)

I still have the menu across the top of the page on my website so I don't know how effective that is! Perhaps a layout overhaul might be something for me to consider at some point. :D
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

I still have the menu across the top of the page on my website so I don't know how effective that is!
Very effective I would imagine, since it is almost guaranteed to appear above the fold. Anyway, menu across the top is different to the left vs right argument.

Jakob Neilsen did a study, using eye tracking, on how people read the content on websites. He concluded that the dominant reading pattern formed an F shape:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Most, if not all, of the big modern sites such as Facebook, Flickr, You Tube, delicious etc, places highly active nav aspects on the right (in addition to more conventional nav placements)

Google, for example, places its sponsored links not on the left but on the right because that's where they're most effective obviously.

You could argue that Google's main nav point on their site is over on the right ;-)
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greenfrog
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Post by greenfrog »

Very interesting, Garri. Thanks for that link.

It doesn't look as though reading the menus is at all important, so maybe it does make sense to have it in a position of easy access for hand movements. (or across the top... where mine is likely to stay, if only because I don't want to do a total overhaul! :lol: )
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

It doesn't look as though reading the menus is at all important
It is important!
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greenfrog
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Post by greenfrog »

Garri,
I meant that the eye-tracking experiment showed little reading of the menu, far more on the content. Which would make sense, I guess. You probably only check out the menu more thoroughly if you liked something and want to check it out further.
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

Yes, but the eyetracking study revealed a hot spot on the top bar of the F - that's where one's menu would be wise to start ;-)
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greenfrog
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Post by greenfrog »

You're right... I was looking at the menu on the left! :lol: :lol:
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

Now, I realise The Times for example has its main nav positioned in the header but look at their site:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk

The tabbed module, 'most read' etc, over on the right is interesting and represents a growing trend for content producers to capitilise on eyeballs moving over to the end of the F's top bar, if you will.

This is what is known as tabbed menus. Powered by technology such as AJAX and JQuery, it allows the user to get a quick overview, or snapshot, of stuff like popular content etc, without the page being refreshed.

And, the context of that top level tabbed menu changes on various sections of their website, like the travel section:

http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/lif ... le/travel/

Your eye, well mine anyway, is drawn along from the left to the right before you've even hit the scroll bar to digest any of the content below the fold. I'm clicking around those tabs to see what's what.

The newly redesigned BBC website makes great use of tabbed menus on their homepage.

http://www.bbc.co.uk
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

You're right... I was looking at the menu on the left!
Yes, but the menu isn't content. The study is talking about how we read content, not how we navigate. Reading between the lines, the study reveals some interesting insights and perhaps it is why instinctively most content producers are drawn to fill that top bar of the F, on the right, with either navigation or lead ins, or adverts.
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CSE
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Post by CSE »

Is not the left the best place for navigation buttons? Because if placed on the right and the viewers screen resolution is smaller than what you had designed the page for they would have to pan across.
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