Creating a Navigation Menu in JavaScript: Step 1
by Christopher S.L.Heng,
Improving Your Site Navigation
We all know of the value of making it easy for visitors to our website to navigate the site. In general, your visitors are unlikely to search every single page of your site just to get the information they want. If they cannot easily get to the information they are looking for, they'll just leave the site.
There are many ways of improving the navigation on your site. This is just one of theways.
Using a Drop Down Menu
One of the simplest ways to improve the navigation on your site is to put a drop down menu on each of your pages. The menu should contain a list of pages on your site. The visitor simply selects a page that he wants and, voila, he is transported there.
Some sites use a drop down menu at the top of each page. The menu, in the case with my site, is implemented using a CGI script in conjunction with a JavaScript. It would, however, still work even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled - he/she would have to click the "Go!" button manually to get to the page (instead of automatically being transported to the page when he selects an item).
If however, you prefer to implement the entire menu in JavaScript, this is possible too. In fact, the JavaScript to do the trick is quite trivial. Implementing the entire facility in JavaScript has the advantage of simplicity (no need to write and install a CGI script) and may indeed be a necessity if you do not have CGI access on your web server. The disadvantage would be that visitors who do not have JavaScript facility (whether because they are using an older browser or by choice through disabling it) in their browsers would not be able to use your navigation facility. My site statistics suggest that this is about 8% to 10% of my visitors (which may not necessarily be so for yours; it depends on your target audience).
Next Step: Implementing the Javascript >>
Copyright 2000 by Christopher S L Heng. All rights reserved.
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