Phase One, Beginning to Panic: Website Navigation

It pains me to break from our regularly scheduled programming, but there are some serious matters we need to address. Namely, do you realize that by the end of this semester I will be expected to have my own website up and running? Even sooner than that, actually. Listen – there is a reason I have so many more computer scientists than doctors on my minion staff. Part of me is more confident that I could pick up open-heart surgery as I go than master the skill set needed to develop and maintain a website. So, in the interests of me attempting the unfathomable, the next few posts need to sort out business details. I have some fun stuff saved for later, though, so stay with me. Today’s Business Topic is:

Navigation


I’m starting here because the site will probably need to hold several facets of me, and at least one of my friends has compared the way my mind works to a kaleidoscope (all those random pieces will make a coherent pattern, if you twist your perception the right way). We need to make sure people know where they’re going, without investing all kinds of time into learning the idiosyncrasies of my thought processes.

I’m probably going to crib a lot from Neil Gaiman’s site. First, an aside. Neil Gaiman is so cool, it isn’t fair. Okay? He can do comics, novels, stories, screenplays, and poems that are at least entertaining, if not something you’d put next to Neruda and Mary Oliver. He interviewed and wrote a book on Douglas Adams. He interviewed and wrote a book with Terry Pratchett. He lives in a house out of Charles Addams’ sexiest dreams. He’s worked with Jonathan Coulton, had They Might Be Giants work for him, and he may not have met Imogene Heap in person, but he crashed at her flat for a while when he was in town. This is not even mentioning Tori Amos, Dave McKean, Charles Vess, Dr. Who, or any other number of People and Things That Are Cool to Nerdy And/Or Indie People that Neil Gaiman gets to be all about knowing personally. And then he goes and has the gall to have an amazing website. The man has no shame.

The reason I picked Neil’s site as a guide is that for all that stuff he’s got his fingers into, the navigation is beautifully simple. As soon as I started thinking about navigation for a website, my mind jumped to ideas for clever metaphors and gimmicks to use as tools (make navigation a compass! a kaleidoscope!). Neil’s site reminds me that the content and, to a lesser extent, the graphics, make a site worth exploring. The navigation should be there to make things simple.

Also, to borrow from another source, I like it when you can hover over a tab and see the subcategories within it. Cosmo’s site (don’t judge me) does this, and it is an excellent tool because each category is so broad. If you’re interested in cute date articles under the Relationships subcategory and want to skip past What’s New In Sex (orgasms! they're pretty great, amiright?), you hover on “Sex and Relationships” and it gives you the option of bypassing anything under that umbrella that you don’t want.

I think for now a top bar with different sections of the site should work just fine for me (did I mention that Neil’s site has a section called “Cool Stuff & Things”? I want that!). I want the top bar to be slim, so I don’t end up with Ms. Gilbert’s trouble of uncertainty of whether your page has changed. I want things labeled very clearly: About Me, Creative Writing, Technical Writing, Cool Things, Awards, etc. If I end up with a lot of subsections, I’ll split them up and put the less important ones on the bottom (or ones that are so standard that viewers will expect to see them on the bottom if they’re not on the top). Oh! Also -- both sites have a selection of four or five of the newest updates featured on the front page, which I think is an excellent way to keep drawing viewers back, as well as acquaint new viewers with what they might want to see on the site.

Basically, it seems to me that the best navigation happens when viewers take the navigation for granted. It should be that intuitive. I’m sure I’ll figure more out as I go about how to make that happen, but that’s the aim.