Should Navigation Be Vertical Or Horizontal?
August 25th, 2010 by James
Over recent years web design trends have shown a greater use of horizontally arranged navigation menus. Often these will stand alone, although sometimes they are used in conjunction with vertical menus, typically placed down the left-hand side of the page and containing subcategories. While the vertical style of menu is certainly the more traditional form of navigation, with the advantage that visitors will instantly recognise what it represents merely by its position on the page, there are benefits offered by the horizontal navigation alternative which should not be overlooked.
One advantage of styling navigation horizontally across the screen is that more of the page can be used for content, with a greater available width than is possible when a vertical menu occupies space on the left. Another useful aspect of links being arranged sideways is that each one can be expanded in the form of a dropdown sub-menu. This is visually cleaner and easier to use than the sub-menus which fly out to the side of many vertical navigation lists, and which can sometimes prove extremely fiddly to handle.
The content of a website ought to dictate the style of menu used, and for some sites, web development issues will mean choosing one style over another. For example, with a vertical menu it is easier to add and remove links than it is with a horizontal navigation bar, where the width of the page limits changes.
Here at internet marketing agency Click Consult, we use horizontal or vertical navigation menus according to each website’s requirements.
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