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Feb
02
2012
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Posted 106 days ago ago by Douglas C.
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Website navigation techniques have existed since the begining of the world wide web. Offering user friendly navigation for your website viewers is a critical part of your website design. Over time there have been many advancements relevant to website menu tools yet some of these have actually had negative results with regards to Website placement because they have made it tougher for search engines to naturally crawl your website.
Among the most well-known menu system types are the simple html menu (1 level only), horizontal drop down menu, vertical menu (aka: side navigation), tabbed navigation and floating navigation. Each type of navigation has its own set of pluses and minuses. Figuring out which type is most effective for a specific website is dependent on the overall website design and the hierarchy of the site.
There are also many various technologies needed to accommodate these various menu system types such as standard HTML, CSS (cascading style sheets), Javascript, jQuery and Flash. From an SEO perspective, building your navigation with simple HTML and CSS is the safest option. However with the arrival of jQuery into the mix, many of the incredible effects only achievable with Javascript can now be applied to a standard HTML unordered list, which is actually extremely SEO-friendly. As far as Flash goes, ther may be ways to get your navigation menu to be relatively SEO friendly, but the bottom line is that flash navigation should be prevented if SEO is a number one concern.
The last consideration that remains is where should the navigation be positioned? The obvious major 2 standards are along the top and the left side. However many blog sites have their navigation located to the right side. There are also many sites that use a mixture of both. For example, their top navigation represents the 1st level of their site and the sub navigation is displayed in the form of left or right nav.
With all this in mind, the final decision to use a common html menu system over a more sophisticated jQuery menu system really comes down to the amount of time you are willing to invest towards the creation of your navigation. jQuery is an awesome new technology, but defintely has a considerable learning curve. If you do want a more sophisticated navigation system and don't have practical experience with jQuery, it's best to make use of an online jquery menu bulider. This way, you get the benefits of having a very SEO-freindly navigation system and the impressive user experience provided by jQuery's capabilities.