Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

It seems strange to be talking about something as basic as “navigation” 11 years into the web era. And yet, if you’re a web designer, chances are you’ve made some mistakes in this fundamental area. I know I have. So let’s go back to basics. Link to Full Article on AListApart >>

Funny - I was just thinking about navigation last night and now AListApart publishes an article on it.

I was thinking about it after visiting http://gospelcon.org/ - the site for the upcoming “Internet Ministry Conference”.  Sometimes I wish I didn’t notice these things and they didn’t bug me—but there I was again, marvelling that a site for a conference that has seminars on web design and web usability and web accessibility features a Flash-based menu system that:

• Prevents you from bookmarking or emailing any page deeper than the home page as the URL doesn’t change (ala 90’s Framesets)
• Doesn’t “remember” where you were on the site if you follow an offsite link then come back to the conference site (the current implementation puts you back at the home page)
• Prevents the window title bar from showing the title of the current page
• Looks to be preventing Google from gathering any specific content from the page for use in when including the Gospelcon site in it’s search results

I found myself wondering - is the “coolness” factor of the Flash menus enough to overcome the usability and SEO issues?

Back to the AListApart article - I wish (as always) the guidelines presented were backed up with research or case studies or some kind of additional support.  I’d be curious to know if they are really issues for users, or just annoyances to highly web savvy designers.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. Brian on August 10, 2006

   Hi Michael,

   Thanks for your critique. We do need to add the #fragment to the URL to make bookmarking and returning to a particular page easier.

   We do have support for accessible and search engine indexing, though. We’re using javascript to detect if the browser supports flash. If it does, we show the flash nav. If it doesn’t, we default to regular old navigation.

   Thanks!

2. Michael Boyink (Author) on August 10, 2006

   Aha…you’re watching your referrers…;)

   Glad to hear you’re still working on the site.

   Did you change something to make your content more visible to Google that isn’t showing up yet?  I still don’t see any page-specific content in the search results.

   It would sure be nice to choose, as a user, what nav I get.  Just because I have Flash, doesn’t mean I prefer it, ya know?

3. Brian on August 10, 2006

   Re: Content visible to Google: The domain is still pretty fresh, which is impacting our overall google ranking, along with the fact not too many people are linking to us yet. So, yeah, thanks for the traffic. :-)

   Re: Choosing your nav: Yeah, we hear ya. I don’t know if we’ll use this nave next year. That said, nothing ventured, nothing gained. This iteration’s taught us a lot about ajax/flash integration, which will come in handy on higher-traffic sites.

4. Michael Boyink (Author) on August 11, 2006

   It’s really not the search placement I was talking about - it’s the content Google shows when including your site in the results.  Each page shows the same content, and none of it seems to be specific to that page - so it’s hard for users to predict what they’ll get when they follow the link.

5. Brian on August 11, 2006

   Hi Michael,

   Hmm, we must be looking at different results; I’m seeing individual pages just fine.

   Thanks!
   Brian

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