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REVIEW SITE NAVIGATION
Designing Navigation For The Impatient Visitor
The important thing to keep in mind when considering site navigation, is that your visitors are an impatient bunch and they want to see results as quick as possible. They aren't going to give you the benefit of the doubt unless they are desperate for the information they think you might have. Since you generally cannot assume they are desperate, you need to get them to the information they have come for as fast as possible.
What does this mean in practice? Well, that your information rich pages out to be no more than 3 clicks from wherever it is they happen to be right now on your site. That's helpful for the search engines too, of course.
So, can this be done for the average review site? Only if it isn't too large. Otherwise pagination issues force up the number of clicks needed to reach the information sought. Ideally your site should consist of 10 to 20 category pages, with perhaps a maximum of 20 to 40 items per category. That way no more than a couple of clicks are required to navigate a category in its entirety. In other words, a site with less than a thousand review items can be manually navigated with ease.
For sites with higher numbers of review items, you probably need to promote the use of your internal search engine more, so that the visitor finds what they are looking for immediately. Keep in mind that searches don't always deliver the right results. Depending on the keywords used by the visitor, the thing they are looking for (which you might just have on your site) could well be overlooked as the result of a poor query (or poor search engine).
In this tutorial we are going to ignore any search engine issues, and concentrate on how best to set up your navigation links. Prior to Review Foundry version 2.04 you did not have much say in this. The navigation links were laid out in a pre-determined manner. But this is no longer true. So some thinking is now required to get the best result.
Yahoo Style Navigation
Long ago, when Yahoo was a simple site to navigate, you could find links to the main categories on the top page in the middle of the page (if I remember right), and on successive pages the subcategories would be listed at the top of the page, and items in the current category would appear below them. This is the default state of affairs for Review Foundry, and the only way navigation links were presented prior to version 2.04.
The navigation template in this case, navigation.ttml, basically looks like this:
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Keep in mind that every single public page generated by the program has this format. So whatever is added to the navigation template appears on every single page. Only the part shown in the red box above changes.
Because we are discussing navigation links, let's see where they appear on the top-most page of a given Category, Team, or Yellowpage branch in Review Foundry, and also where they appear on subsequent pages (arrived at by clicking on any of the navigation links found on the top-most page):
| Top-most page | Category page | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Browse Categories
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Items > Category Orange
Orange Subcategories
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The red bars in our schematic above are navigation links: hyperlinks that take us to a new category page, such as the orange bar that represents the link to the Orange category shown on the right.
So why was this navigation scheme chosen as the default one? Because it has one significant advantage: efficiency of layout. No matter how many levels of top-level categories or subcategories are ccreated there is only a small part of the page dedicated to navigation links: the section at the top, showing the breadcrumbs to the current category, and the links to the next level subcategories, if there are any.
So is there anything wrong with this design? How about navigation links on the left of the page? Well, there are advantages and disadvantages to adding a side panel. We'll see what those are next.
Side Panel Navigation
For many years I thought the Yahoo style navigation was sufficient. But occasionally I'd get people who wanted to display the navigation links in a side panel to the left of the page. Usually these were people whose main aim was to sell something to their visitors. They wanted to make access to every part of their site as easy as possible to increase their revenue. Nothing wrong with that. As I began to look at affiliate marketing I realized that this is an important consideration for a lot of webmasters, so now I have added that capability to the program. But it raises some issues that you need to think about before blindly activating side panel navigation. We'll look at those in this section.
It it worth pointing out that adding a side panel of navigation links can assist the visitor with navigation by knocking off up to 2 clicks to get to a page in a completely different category. That's the reason I decided I could not ignore the issue any longer.
There are 2 ways to put a side panel into the Review Foundry pages. Either the side panel goes into the navigation template, or it is worked into the inner pages. Here are schematics for the 2 cases, with the green bars representing the side navigation links:
| Add to navigation template | Add to inner templates | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In terms of configuration variables, these 2 options are represented by the second and third states of this variable found on the Configure > Build / Browse control panel:
The first state in this drop down select menu, where no is selected represents the default Yahoo style navigation, with no side panel navigation links. The other two options, add to navigation template and add to inner templates, produce the states shown in the schematic above.
Which Is Better?
Should you add your side panel of navigation links to the navigation template, or to the inner templates? There is no definitive answer to this. Both options have their drawbacks. But if your side panel is very tall, going down past the page fold, you almost certainly want to add it to the navigation template. That way you do not have to worry about the length of this column messing up the formatting of inner templates. In this case the side panel is contained in its own (left) cell and does not affect content in the right cell. Furthermore because the content of the navigation template is the same for every page, the position of the side panel won't change at all as your visitor moves from page to page.
On the other hand, if your side panel is very short, you might want to add it to the inner templates. The main reason for this is that you can then use the space directly under the side panel as well. If you place the side panel in the navigation template, then none of the space below it can be used, except perhaps as a place to add advertisements.
Here's a schematic for category pages that sports either a short side panel of navigation links within the inner templates or a tall side panel. Notice how in the example on the left, with the short side panel, the inner template is able to utilize space that would not be available had the side panel appeared in the navigation template. But for the same page layout, when the side panel is somewhat taller there is a big gap between the subcategories listed at the top of the page, and the category items listed below.
| SHORT side panel / Inner template | TALL side panel / Inner template | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The good news is that the number of navigation links in the side panel is fixed, so you have a rough idea about how much white space you are dealing with (and have to fill) on every page, should you decide to stick with placing the side panel within inner templates. Note that you won't know exactly how much white space, however, unless every category has the same number of next-level subcategories within it.
So if you decide you want to utilize that space below the side panel, and therefore stick with placing it inside the inner templates, what can you add to the white space area?
Fortunately, as of 2.04, there are a number of options.
White Space Filler Options
Prior to version 2.04 you could add several possible side panels to the top-most page of the category branch in order to showcase latest items, featured items, and latest reviews. Now you can incorporate these extra features into the category pages at every level and the records pulled are taken directly from the current category. Moreover, 2.04 has introduced the idea of tiling records across and down the page, so that you can elect to show, say, the 3 latest reviews from every category, and paste them across the page to fill white space like this:
| Including Latest Reviews | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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To see all the options available to you for filling in this white space, see the tiling tutorial: HOW TO TILE REVIEW RECORDS. You can, of course, use these options to add extra material to the pages regardless of whether you add the side navigation panel to the inner templates, or to the navigation template.
You can also elect not to use these white space filler options, and instead add Template Toolkit code to serve up advertisements. It's entirely up to you. Study the templates, experiment, and figure out what suits you best.
Side Panel Length
There is some latitude in the way you can present the side panel. You can elect to either include second-level container links in the panel, or suppress them. This can shrink the size of your side panel of navigation links quite a bit, possibly by a factor of 2 to 10. See this variable on the Configure > Build / Browse control panel:
Documentation
Documentation for Review Foundry, which is entirely separate from these tutorial pages, is an ongoing project (as is this tutorial). You should find that there is sufficient information in the Review Foundry User Manual to answer most of your technical needs. Suggestions for improvement to both the User Manual and this tutorial are always welcomed. As more users gain experience with Review Foundry, and issues are resolved for its application in different areas, information gained from that experience will make its way into these pages.
Note: If you cannot find the information you are looking for in this tutorial, try the Review Foundry User Manual which you should find far more comprehensive than the instructional dialog found here.
Copyright © 2004 Random Mouse Software. All Rights Reserved.