Now, a beautiful example all should glean from:
What you'll notice in the first link is the lack of any sense of where you are in the article and how much farther you have to trudge through pages. Want to just get to the conclusion? Next page, next page, next page. As a writer, you may find it depressing that few people are interested in reading the body of your article, but think about it in their shoes: they are reading multiple articles, and if you've already established credibility (which is why the body is still important), they just want your brief summary and conclusion of the matter.
Now take a look at Xbit: a very brief intro, followed by a well-labeled table of contents. This table of contents is also available in a drop-down box at the end of each page, in addition to linked page numbers at the top and bottom of each page. If you can't navigate an xbit article... well... there's no hope for you.
Now, Anandtech and Tomshardware also do pretty well for navigation, but they each could learn an important lesson from Xbit. For Anandtech, I loved the way they were going with some articles, placing the summary/conclusion on the first page. The problem in consistency. They only do it sometimes. Compare that to Xbit's format, which is VERY consistent. As for Tomshardware... their drop-down navigation makes me pull my hair out sometimes. If you don't keep the mouse pointer in the box, the box collapses.
If anyone can find a way to improve on Xbit's formula, please do, and let me know... but for any site navigation, always keep two things in mind:
1) Ease
2) Consistency
No comments:
Post a Comment