Web Wednesday Recap – Top Navigation
If you missed our workshop on top navigation, don’t fret – we are here for you!
Today I’ll be recapping our recent (and very first…) Web Wednesday that we held on March 22. It went so well and we were thrilled with the response from everyone.
Please check out the highlights below!
What do we mean by navigation?
Mary Kathryn kicked things off with an overview. Navigation is essentially a way to help users navigate and get around your website. A nav menu is usually made up of the static pages on your site. She introduced different kinds of navigation. These include:
- Top/horizontal nav
- Side/vertical nave
- Primary nav
- Secondary nav
- Top-level, second-level, third-level nav (these are the pages and sub-pages)
- Jump to menus (for things that may not be a part of the main nav – at the top right in some of our themes)
- Footer
Sites in our cms theme use a side nav. Our framework theme has a top nav. And the cuTheme pilot sites have either side or top navigation menus. As you can see we have tried a variety of things. And we are now thinking about how best to approach the navigation in cuTheme. One of the things we are considering is a move to top nav only.
Why are we considering the move to top navigation?
We’ve been researching and chatting with others. Here are some of the benefits we see to a top nav:
- It would create a consistent user experience across the Carleton domain.
- Allows the use of the entire width of the screen for content (more real estate)
- Makes for a better mobile experience (simplified, limited number of top items)
- Accessible and consistent at Carleton and becoming industry standard across the web.
- Simplifies our template. This streamlines development and creates more capacity to work on community-requested features (cool things for you!)
Concerns
The number one concern voiced from our community was around the size of menus and how this would work with a top nav. Other issues that came up included: the potential loss of red buttons on the side, how multilevel navs would function, and the work involved in having to rework current navigation menus. These are all things that we will take under careful consideration.
Options and best practices
Next up, Troy took the floor to share some examples of sites from around the web. Our team has been researching best practices and we’ve looked at a lot of different sites.
Here is a list of sites that Troy previewed:
One of our clients, Jesse, mentioned Stripe as an example of modern-looking navigation.
Breakout!
We broke into small groups to chat about concerns and to get your thoughts and ideas about top navigation. We came away with the impression that many of you are excited about the idea of a top nav. We also had some great suggestions, such as considering how a top nav would interact with the search bar. People asked about re-organizing their menus. And someone suggested a workshop focused on re-working menus and best practices. (We love this idea – stay tuned!)
cuTheme sneak peek
When we reconvened as a group, Troy gave us a sneak peek into cuTheme and some of the blocks the team has been working on. You can have a look at some of our teaser videos here.
Next steps
Thank you so much to everyone who attended. If you were not able to make it, please feel free to have a look at the video below. We are going to take our research along with your ideas and go through a review process. We’ll work on developing navigation ideas and mockups to share with this community.
If you have any other thoughts or concerns, please reach out. We’d love to hear from you!