Design Station Musings

Website menu techniques have been around since the dawn of the world wide web. Providing easy to use navigation for your website visitors is a critical part of any website design. Over time there have been many improvements in terms of website navigation solutions and some of these have actually had a negative impact relevant to SEO because they have made it tougher for search engines to effectively crawl your website.

Among the most well-known menu system types are the simple html menu (1 level only), horizontal drop down menu, vertical menu (aka: side navigation), tabbed navigation and floating navigation. Each style of navigation has its own set of pros and cons. Determining which type is most effective for a specific website is dependent on the overall website design and the structure of the website.

There are also several technologies needed to accommodate these various menu system types such as standard HTML, CSS (cascading style sheets), Javascript, jQuery and Flash. From an SEO perspective, building your navigation with simple HTML and CSS is the safest option. However with the debute of jQuery into the mix, many of the cool effects only doable with Javascript can now be applied to a standard HTML unordered list, which happens to be truly SEO-friendly. As far as Flash goes, ther may be ways to get your navigation menu to be reasonably SEO friendly, but the bottom line is that flash navigation should be prevented if SEO is a number one concern.

The last aspect to give some thought to is where should the navigation be placed? The obvious top 2 standards are along the top and the left side. However many blog sites have their navigation located to the right side. There are also a number of sites that use a mix of both. For example, their top navigation represents the 1st level of their site and the sub navigation is presented in the form of left or right nav.

With all this in mind, the verdict to use a plain html menu system over a more advanced jQuery menu system really comes down to the amount of time you are willing to invest towards the refinement of your navigation. jQuery is an awesome new technology, but defintely has a considerable learning curve. If you do prefer a more innovative navigation system and don't have working experience with jQuery, it's best to work with an online jquery menu creator. This way, you get the rewards of having a very SEO-freindly navigation system and the excellent user experience provided by jQuery's functionality.

About the Author:

Douglas Parker is a contributing developer to the Skin Generator project at http://www.skingenerator.com. The Skin Generator project allows website developers to create a killer jQuery menu using the on-line jQuery menu generator tool.

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