Sent by Christian Heilmann on 12 February 2003 12:12
>Chris wrote:
>>I know, then again I yet have to find a b2b customer or a b2c customer
>>that considers a right hand navigation a good idea.
>>
>
>Why not? What are their arguments against right hand navigation?
Conventions. We read from left to right, if the content is an online
magazine, the content is the most important, hence ALA and Zeldman
or anyone who invites people primarily to read, can do so.
If I have an extensive navigation though, or a website that offers a
variety of products, the navigation becomes a lot more important. I
need to give the user options to choose from, and those appear, by
convention, inherited from print, on the left side.
How many online shops or high level content pages like news sites do
you know that have a right hand nav?
After like 4 years people are used to the nav being either on top, or
on the left, the first two places you glance at once the page is
loaded.
Anything that is on the right hand nav is either specials, advertisement
or polls or links to photostories, in a nutshell add-ons. And users
seem to have developed some blindness for these.
>I find it more convenient to have the nav near the scrollbar. I also think
>it improves readibility since there's nothing to disturb the start of the
>main content rows (i.e. the left side can be left blank, as the good old
>Daily Zeldman had it).
All valid points, if your main page is about textual content to start
with. I am not condemning right hand navs here, they have their places
and make sense, but conventional usability and tests show that there
is still a long way to go to make them commonly accepted.
