Pallian Creative

The Art of Navigation

Believe it or not, I spent a good part of the day today trying to figure out a good navigation solution for the new sites we’re building for TIM. It’s one of those things; I’ve created countless websites with countless different navigation solutions - some work great and some just blows (mainly because the client thinks it works, but for the end user, its a nightmare).

When I designed the original site for Wall Street Survivor, we had spent more than a week trying out all sorts of horizontal and vertical navigation solutions to see what works best. In the end, we settled for the horizontal version you see on the site today. I’m not a big fan of the horizontal navs - mainly because it gives you no room to grow. You are limited to the width of the site and over time, it just gets crowded. So with that out of the way, I started experimenting with different examples of vertical navigations.

I did some research (by research, I mean Googling) to see what the latest navigation trends were and stumbled upon this neat little post from Smashing Mag. Armed with new found inspiration, I started coding. And 6 hours and many many iterations later, I think I may have finally found a solution.

Take a look at our testing platform: www.timothyskyes.com. I wanted to put it out there before we go live to get some feedback form you. Let me know your thoughts in the poll below so I can work on improving it. Essentially, we wanted a navigation that can grow over time (vertically) and that would not conflict with all the other javascripts on the site. The code still has room for improvements - so any suggestions you may have is always appreciated.