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Lesson 9 - Cooking Up Some Menus

© Kim Vickery

I know, I know. I promised that we would talk about cascading style sheets in this lesson. Upon further review, however, it occurred to me that the style sheets would do you no good unless we first addressed the important topic of site navigation,AKA menus. You don't want to go out into the world of Web armed with only a little bit of cheese instead of the whole enchilada, right? Think of this lesson as the tortilla that wraps around all of the contents of your meal...er...Web site.

Sooooo, instead of style sheets we'll be taking this time to explore different approaches to site layout and what it means to have good vs. bad navigation. Weeeeee, what fun, eh? Oh, it will be...trust me.

As a rabid Web surfer, and as someone who is easily distracted...er...fascinated with all finds of topics, I often find myself following research paths far and wide; I meander from site to site, checking out this and that, and filling my brain with useful (and sometimes useless) information. I used to do the same thing as a kid wandering the stacks of my local public library. BUT, when I wanted a specific book, I didn't wander around the stacks trying to find it. I checked the card catalog. The Dewey decimal system was my friend.

Now, let's say you went to your favorite Web site, we'll pick Amazon.com, and were trying to find all of the cookbooks that were written by Julia Childs. If you've ever been to Amazon before, you'll know they have thousands and thousands of pages. They also have a great search feature into which you simply type "Julia Childs" and it returns a big ol' list of books. Easy breezy. Problem solved.

Now let's say you're not really looking for a specific author or title, you just want to review lists of cookbooks. Yes, the search feature will work here too if you type in "cookbooks." OR you can use the MENUS (those handy links they've provided you) and NAVIGATE to the cookbooks section of the site. Search and navigate are the virtual equivalents to the old Dewey Decimal card catalog.

Thousands of pages, and you can navigate directly to the cookbooks list with just a few clicks?? That's a neat trick! How'd they do that?

Wellllll, in Amazon's case, they had a large budget to spend on user testing. Chances are we don't. But, we can still think about some good rules for navigation so that people can quickly and easily move around our site. If your personal site grows dramatically, you can also think about adding a search feature to it later, but plan for it now. Well discuss this MUCH later under more advanced topics.

The copyright of the article Lesson 9 - Cooking Up Some Menus in Website Creation is owned by Kim Vickery. Permission to republish Lesson 9 - Cooking Up Some Menus in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.