Constructing Usable Web Menus

Just menus? Yes. This book focuses on a single, vitally important task that confronts everyone who builds web sites for use by people: how to code and present menus that are easy to understand and use, that convey what users need to know about the many paths they can take to get to the information they want, in a variety of technologies. Every web site has a menu (trust us-we looked for a professional site without a menu, and came up empty). Some sites have two, three, or more menus on the same page. Menus give users a simple way to deal with the dozens, hundreds, even thousands of options (or more), ideally sorting those options into understandable divisions people can choose with some confidence that they'll end up more or less where they intended to go. In this book, we'll show you how professional sites organize content, present options, and use a wide array of technologies for navigation. Sometimes these approaches work well and serve as excellent models for your own navigation systems. Sometimes? Well - nobody's perfect We'll walk you through an extensive range of different menu code that can be easily downloaded from http: //www. glasshaus. com/, and adapted to your own needs, taking all the hassle out of menu coding