Website Navigation with Matthew Marco and Ceci Dadisman
When one thinks of website design, they usually picture their favorite websites or popular pages that have made it around their social circles. These sites can include news, sports, special interests, or even social networking platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. These sites are great for making your brand known and available to a vast audience online, especially if you want to get people talking. For instance, many ornithological organizations like The Cornell Lab of Ornithology or British Ornithologist’ Union use Twitter and other social networking sites in order to get users to their websites. Once you arrive at these websites, you are bombarded by bright colors and large scale images of different species of birds. These websites use the vivid imagery to grab the user’s attention and make the topic of the site clear to anyone who visits the page.
Recently, I got to sit in on a lecture given by Ceci Dadisman, who spoke on how to create award winning websites. In her presentation, she noted that most visitors to a site end up looking at the top left first. I had also heard this echoed in Matthew Marco’s presentation on website navigation. By placing the most important information at the top left of the site, you manage to keep the user on your site longer. Another thing she noted was that the navigation bar for a website should always be at the top of the site. This makes navigation easier and helps users know what to expect out of your website. With this in mind, I took a moment to look at my favorite ornithological websites ad noticed that they used these strategies. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology put their logo and about page on the left side of the page, while keeping the other less important information on the right. They also managed to put the navigation menu in the top center of the page. This made the site easy to move around and let me know what information the site contained. The British Ornithologist’ Union followed a similar layout but I was actually surprised by how different it was. The site had a social media bar in the top left of the page that linked you to their Facebook page, Twitter, and their site map. The logo was then put underneath the bar and then was followed by a ticker filled with the organization’s recent tweets. I thought this was a unique approach to website design because of how much pressure was put on drawing people to their social media accounts.
