Web Site Menu

What not to do when you’re making a menu for your website. I snipped this from an article giving tips to web developers, by Carolyn Snyder.

“People use various terms to describe these menus — rollover, fly-out, pop-up, hierarchical, or cascading. These are menus that pop up automatically when the user positions the cursor over a particular item onscreen. Whatever you call them, these things can be so difficult to use that they border on evil.

I don’t care that prominent software vendors have been using cascading menus for years — obviously they have forgotten that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that’s exactly what users do — they try to take the diagonal route to their desired menu option rather than across and down. And as soon as they move off the menu, they lose it (or even worse, get an unrelated one). Depending on where the user leaves the cursor after clicking, another menu might pop up, possibly covering part of the page the user wanted.

I recently tested a site that used rollover menus. Of the 17 users who took part, four complained of difficulty using the menus, and one was so stymied that I had to help him. Even users who understood this interaction model sometimes had difficulty selecting the menu options they wanted.”

I couldn’t agree more. Plain text menus are so much better, for two reasons really. The author of that article talks about the useability issue, but there’s another reason to not use these types of menus. They’re not search engine friendly. A plain text menu is much more search engine friendly. Use text, and have the text be related to the keywords important for the page it links to. Don’t just put “home”, have the text say something about your site.