Pages Navigation

Last time, I talked about blog content organization, and I mentioned the pages bar, briefly.

To recap, I'm making a few pages, you know, those essentials that aren't quite blog content, but still essential or expected. I'm talking About and Contact, Buttons page and Parties and Features page that I decided to present as pages to free up some valuable sidebar real estate. They are nice to have, but can be quite cluttersome, so having them out of the way at the top and bottom as individual pages seemed like a smart move. I'm really hoping they will be easy to locate, especially the button page since it's less common to have them as a page, but not unseen. Well ok, I'm really still on the fence about the buttons page. It wouldn't take that much space in the sidebar section, but at the same time how many people actually use the button? TBC...

Quite a bit more unconventional is seeing a resource page and an archive/sitemap page, but I wanted to create them. The resource page because I want to give credit to the wonderful (mostly) free digital art I use around the blog; we're talking fonts, shapes, tags, doodles, paintbrushes, etc. The Sitemap I'm still a little on the fence about it, I love sitemaps for Wordpress blogs, gives an other way for people to find your content the way they want to find it (archived in chronological order, or by label/category), and includes ALL your content. Every single page.

Those are the 6 pages I'm planning. Sometimes you also see a Home tab with them, but I find that redundant seeing as the header or logo should point to the home page of a blog, or website. I really hope it doesn't confuse people, and I'll see if I need to add it later, but really the more I think of it, the more I think it's just convention for it to do that, so I don't see there being a big problem about this.

Not everyone separates their pages tabs from their content navigation tabs, but the blogs and websites that do do that have really attracted me lately. Actually, a lot of them have the pages bar at almost the very top of the blog page, sometimes above the header/logo, and then the content navigation below it. That's what I decided to do, even if I don't have that many pages, or categorical navigation to showcase.


I'd also like to have simple text links of those pages in the footer section of the blog. Websites do it like that, and I think it's expected to have links to that kind of information at the bottom of a page, too. The footer is often under utilized and neglected, but really when someone gets to the bottom of your blog you don't want that to stop them from continuing finding more stuff to read, so it's really quite logical.

Wait til you see what I have up my sleeve for graphics and coding for these bars, I'm really excited about them!!

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Blog Content Organization: Navigation

Everybody's got their own way of organizing and displaying their content. Some do it well, some not so well (just a fact...). Nothing frustrates me more when I find a blog post I really enjoy than not being able to find more content to enjoy on that blog. Needless to say, I don't stay there very long.

So far, I've been trying to divide up the subject of blog content organization. It's such a huge portion of the blog, and quite multifaceted when you start thinking about it. And sometimes one doesn't realize just how much thought does, and should go into planning it well, because it's more "behind-the-scenes" stuff.

But here's what it really boils down to: can your readers find more posts to read on your blog? How easily can they find it? Is it intuitive? Is it well presented?

And here's a really big blog pet peeve of mine: I hate it when people slap on a label page for navigation in the navigation bar. Whether it be for a series or a category, it just looks awful and is so hard to navigate and find what you are looking for.

Here's what I expect from navigation, and you can very well disagree with me, but I think navigation should show you a glimpse of the content, as much of it as is relevant to know whether I want to read the post or not, without seeing the whole post and without having to click through pages and pages of archives to see more. And that's exactly what labels don't do.

A label is just a filter really, only displaying the posts with that label, and displaying all of the post. Unless you have truncated posts, which in that case can make it manageable to browse through as long as it's just a small snippet, labels are awful IMHO. And labels are already there in a widget type thing most of the time on a blog. If I wanted to view posts in this manner (which I personnaly don't) I would click on the particular label. When I click on a navigation menu, I expect to see a list of blog posts pertaining to that subject where I can CHOOSE which ones to read with ease. Also, it really helps not to have to load all the content, and pictures, you don't want to read.

That's my 2 cents on the matter, and that's how I'm choosing to display MY navigation, or well how NOT to display my navigation. Navigation takes work, and there just is no adequate shortcut for it. So at the very least, have a Project Gallery, and if you feel up to it, further separate and sort your content for easier navigation.

As I mentioned in the last post, I'm going to display my 3 main categories in the navigation bar upfront, one beside the other, then when you click on one it will open up, in a drop-down menu, the rest of the sub categories.

And here's where you need to consider touchscreens. There are no hover effects on touchscreens, so if you set your drop-down menu to open up on hover, it will not work on tablets and smartphones. I've recently come across this problem on my new tablet. It's a pain not being able to open up the drop-down menu. The only thing that makes it better is when at least it opens up a page where you can see the sub-categories and choose on. And again where labels DON'T work.

I need to look further into how to make a drop-down menu that opens when clicked; I'm sure it can be done.

I still think labels are a good idea, but they shouldn't be used instead of proper navigation. They should be their own separate navigation system. You often see them in the sidebar, which is where I'm probably gonna put them, but I'm also considering putting them in the footer section. I haven't decided yet. I'm working from the top down and I'm still in header mode.

An other thing is that I want to separate my navigation into 2: actual posts navigation bar (detailed above), and a pages navigation. I'm talking the About Page, the Contact page. Things that don't evolve over time (too much... ie static), that don't really lead to much content, but that are still quite essential and expected in a blog.

I've seen this done more and more on blogs and I find it very well presented, so I'm implementing it on my own blog.

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