David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

It has been a very busy day indeed!

Finding out my existing navigation was browser specific was a little disheartening. However, I would like to introduce you to a new solution:



Let me explain more.
 
Firstly, do not be horrified by the unstyled tab! Also, do not think fr one moment that the Dog and Cat tab will stay!

This Ajax script can be downloaded from Dynamic Drive.

So what will this menu do?

In using the CSS based navigation menu, I racked up a whopping 230 lines of navigation code. That equates to 20KB which is a lot to download on every page - WITHOUT the actual page contents included.

So the first point is that it will reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed.

The next point is that it will be tabbed navigation. Rather like the 'old' CSS menu, open up one option and it opens up several more.

Secondly, each tab can contain standard HTML - such as a search form or a drop down select box. This means that particular features can be integrated into the navigation and called up on demand by the user.

Thirdly, updating the menu is a doddle! The 'old' CSS based menu was constructed using as much as 6 nested <li> tags - this is a nightmare to get validated.

HOWEVER - there is a major downside to using the 'new' Ajax based menu. Firstly is the obvious reliance on the visitor to have JavaScript enabled on their web browser so this is not really worth worrying about. The major concern is that the CSS menu was acting as an SEO tool. A few of my Google searches have occurred due to people searching for (a menu item) + (a content item) such as TomTom Comparison. This particular phrase is not in my main site as such but can be constructed by Google.

Ultimately, it will provide a better solution for my visitor. Will I loose traffic? Possibly. Will I lie awake at night worrying? Not yet. Remember - no SEO techniques have actually been carried out. That comes in a little while, once all the design work is complete.