Bruce Moen
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To All,
A month or so ago I received a suggestion to improve website navigation by creating a table of contents type menu. The suggester felt that many of the pages on the site were difficult to find. After spending some time reviewing all the pages on the site I had to agree with the suggester. There were many pages that could only be found via links embedded within the text of other website pages. In my review I found some pages I myself had forgotten existed. So, I began looking for a way to add a table of contents type menu to every page of the website.
Some of you probably saw my first attempt at such a navigation menu that was implemented as a single, dark blue, pull-down menu bar that spanned the top of each page. While it worked well, that menu bar location was permanently pinned to the top of the page. When users scrolled down a page to read its content, the menu bar scrolled up off the screen and was invisible and unreachable unless the user scrolled back up to the top page. For me having to scroll back up the page to access the navigation menu was very, very annoying.
After further research I found software that creates a 'floating' menu bar. As a user scrolls down a page the menu bar moves with the page. So no matter where a user is within the content of any website page, when they decide to go to some other page, the floating menu bar is visible on their screen and easily accessible without having to scroll back up the page.
I understand that some visitors see this floating website navigation menu bar visually annoying. Sorry 'bout that. Others see it as a navigation tool that is always visible on their screen, that lists every page on the website, that allows them to jump from any location within any website page they are viewing to any other website page with one mouse click.
Happily, those who are annoyed by this new feature have found a way to block the java script that creates this menu to make it disappear. And now, also happily, everyone else has an easy to use table of contents type menu that allows website navigation from anywhere within any website page to any other website page.
As an attempt to make this new feature a little less obtrusive less for those of you who find it visually annoying I could experiment with changing the color scheme to something that stands out a little less.
Bruce
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