Design Station Musings

Website menu systems have been around since the dawn of the web. Delivering simple to use navigation for your site viewers is a vital aspect of almost any website design. Over the years there have been many improvements about website menu systems and some of these have actually had negative results in terms of Website positioning because they have made it more challenging for search engines to naturally crawl your website.

Among the most widely used 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 positives and negatives. Deciding which style is most appropriate for a particular website is based upon on the overall website design and the structure of the site.

There are also many various technologies necessary 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 arrival of jQuery into the mix, many of the brilliant effects only feasible with Javascript can now be applied to a standard HTML unordered list, which is definitely extremely SEO-friendly. As far as Flash goes, there are a few ways to get your navigation menu to be reasonably SEO friendly, but the bottom line is that flash navigation should be avoided if SEO is a top concern.

The last consideration that remains is where should the navigation be positioned? The obvious major 2 standards are along the top and the left side. However many blog sites have their navigation placed to the right side. There are also numerous 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 final choice to use a straightforward html menu system over a more advanced jQuery menu system really comes down to the amount of time you are willing to devote towards the creation of your navigation. jQuery is an awesome new technology, but defintely has a significant learning curve. If you do want a more sophisticated navigation system and don't have experience with jQuery, it's most effective to work with an online jquery menu bulider. This way, you get the advantages of having a very SEO-freindly navigation system and the great user experience provided by jQuery's capabilities.

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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