So, I went ahead and got naked today too. Question about hierarchy (you can really see it clearly without styles), do you think that it’s better for the site navigation to be at the top of the unstyled page or the bottom?
Take the user who needs to use the navigation - is it better to have it immediately presented at the top of the page, or make them scroll past the content toward the bottom? I think that your page works from a usability perspective with the nav toward the bottom, but I’m not convinced that it’s always the right choice.
Also, any thoughts from an SEO perspective on presenting navigation more toward the top of the page?
My reasoning here goes like this- for a content page, one that’s just as or even more likely to be visited on an inbound link or search results page as it is to be browsed to from within the site, I’ve always felt that the content should be presented at the top. Obviously this is an edge case- in reality as text, voice or mobile browsers don’t make up a huge percentage or my site traffic. Still it’s nice to know they get a reasonable experience.
My home page goes in the other direction (for both regular and text browsers) with the site choices laid out as the “content.” I can definitely see a case for navigation at the top on certain pages/ types of sites. if people are landing on a home page and working through to specific content then navigation at the top would be helpful.
I’ve also heard for years that content at the top also helps from an SEO perspective. It was reinforced a couple of weeks ago in a webinar I was on, so I’m glad I stuck with it as a goal…
Scott Says:
So, I went ahead and got naked today too. Question about hierarchy (you can really see it clearly without styles), do you think that it’s better for the site navigation to be at the top of the unstyled page or the bottom?
Take the user who needs to use the navigation - is it better to have it immediately presented at the top of the page, or make them scroll past the content toward the bottom? I think that your page works from a usability perspective with the nav toward the bottom, but I’m not convinced that it’s always the right choice.
Also, any thoughts from an SEO perspective on presenting navigation more toward the top of the page?
Just wonderin’
Posted: April 9th, 2008 at 11:33 am
rob Says:
My reasoning here goes like this- for a content page, one that’s just as or even more likely to be visited on an inbound link or search results page as it is to be browsed to from within the site, I’ve always felt that the content should be presented at the top. Obviously this is an edge case- in reality as text, voice or mobile browsers don’t make up a huge percentage or my site traffic. Still it’s nice to know they get a reasonable experience.
My home page goes in the other direction (for both regular and text browsers) with the site choices laid out as the “content.” I can definitely see a case for navigation at the top on certain pages/ types of sites. if people are landing on a home page and working through to specific content then navigation at the top would be helpful.
I’ve also heard for years that content at the top also helps from an SEO perspective. It was reinforced a couple of weeks ago in a webinar I was on, so I’m glad I stuck with it as a goal…
Posted: April 9th, 2008 at 12:47 pm