Right hand Web navigation
Posted by joy
Is the right hand nav bar the rounded tab of (almost) 2007?
I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it seems that there is a higher concentration of content based Web sites with right hand nav bars, I mean not only this blog (and others), but also Google SERP pages (just think of the right hand Google ads) and now the newly redesigned digg with no sort of navigation on the left hand side.
Now I’m wondering how many other sites have right hand nav bars exclusively. And I wonder if right hand nav bars change Information Architecture in any significant way.
Technorati Tags: Web design, Web navigation, Web
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December 19th, 2006 at 10:59 am
I’ve proudly been right-hand-nav only since 2002 :-)
Mostly this was for accessibility purposes — put the navigation after the main content for screenreaders.
December 22nd, 2006 at 7:56 pm
This is also a SEO thing, as the bots tend to read from left to right. Hence you want your content to appear before your navigation elements on your site.
December 23rd, 2006 at 6:54 pm
This is also a SEO thing, as the bots tend to read from left to right.
No. Unless you were joking…
December 24th, 2006 at 3:20 am
Right hand nav makes sense from a usability perspective, especially on pages longer than a screen for one because that is the side where we expect to find a scroll bar - another navigation tool, + usually it’s more important to make sure content immidiately accesible ‘findable’ at a glance and readable.
Some research seems to sugest that navigation bars will tend to become less ‘persistent’
Interesting topic