Navigation Bars
I’ve noticed that this is becoming more and more popular. I eventually switched layouts just so I could have a nav. bar, and then went back to the plain old “Minima” layout and used a paste-in html code. It was so easy! And it’s convenient. If you want to know the best navigation bar I’ve ever used, this is the one.
It’s very easy. You go to “edit html,” paste in this quick code, then add a widget on your layout page. You plug in the html, put in the links you want, and decide which ones you want to drop down—and even which colors they are!—then put in your pages.
Every good website has a short, quick, easy navigation bar. It starts with a four or five broad links, and breaks down further later on into more specific pages. That’s why I recommend a dropdown nav bar.
Here’s a rundown of what should be in a navigation bar:
- You need a “Home” tab, because A sometimes clicking the picture or header doesn’t work and B it looks professional (my other rant).
- You can have an “about” tab. You decide what “about” entails, but it should contain things about the blog, about you, about what you do or don’t review etc.
- You need a “reviews” tab—because that’s why we’re here, right?
- You need a legal tab of some sort, either “Policy” or “disclaimer”
- CONTACT. (Contact is most important: I’ll talk about that below.)
If you have a dropdown menu, you can make this easy. Here’s an example:
- Home
- The Life and Lies—> challenges, contests, songs, free downloads, knitting, crafts, riddles (personal stuff)
- Books –>To be reviewed, Schedule (google calendar), Inventory (mostly goodreads widgets and lists)
- Reviews—>Five Star Bookshelf, Reviews by Title. eventually I’ll do a second rollover menu for ‘reviews’ and sort it by title, author, rating etc. You see what I mean by broad and breaking down from broad to narrow?
- About—>About Me, About my rating system, Policy, Disclaimer
- Sources (one link, with a page of everyone I review for who sends me books for free. You can put your libraries/book stores in there if you want to, I guess.)
- Contact
Contact
Contact should be easiest to find. It should be the very second, or the very last button on every nav bar. Home should always be the first. If they can’t contact you… how on earth are they supposed to send you stuff? Ok I’m being sarcastic, but the point is people need something, at least an e-mail address.
The contact page should have this: E-mail address or contact form, quick summary of policy or phrase saying “click here (link) to see which books I do or do not accept before e-mailing me” or the like, and a link to your disclaimer.
If you need even more broad-to-narrowness than that, you can do a double-drop down or a multi-level drop down. It drops down, and then scrolls over as many times as you want (you just have to know how to read html—more on that another time) and you can get even pickier about organization. However, don’t go too crazy because then you’ve got so much sorting that nobody has any idea where to look for anything anymore. Try to keep your nav bar under 10 links, and no more than five or six per drop-down.
Next in the series: Post Body, Post numbers, and Sitemaps.
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