CoPress

Last Thursday was the second session of the Summer Web Design Camp and after some technical difficulties Jake Paul, Will Davis,Lauren, Daniel, Mo Jangda, and myself discussed navigation menus and what could be done to drastically change them.

The session started off with a quick demo of creating drop-down menus in WordPress and the files involved are all available for download. From there we started discussing the different ways in which sites handle navigation and what we all liked and disliked about the various approaches. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to record all of this discussion because of some technical problems with my laptop, but I’ve included what I have at the bottom of this post as well as the text from the Skype chat.

Some notes on navigation practices that came up during the session:

• There was a lot of talk about breaking navigation into more topic-oriented menus. While this may be harder to accomplish for college papers that do not have a tremendous amount of content it is also something that more sites are moving toward. Some examples mentioned were The Spokesman Review and Newser.
• Also discussed was whether dynamic content like categories ought to be kept separate from the more static contact of a site (i.e. the About and Contact pages). While there was no consensus reached on this most believed that it was important to make the categories be the parts of the menu that are emphasized while the other pages of a site should be visible, but not as heavily emphasized.
• Also mentioned was the way in which Apple uses its footer to convey a tremendous amount of information. By creating what is essentially a sitemap there they provide dozens of links to helpful information to the visitor.
• The discussion also moved toward news aggregation. Lauren mentioned how the San Luis Obispo Tribune is aggregating local Twitter users. While nobody could think of any college news organizations utilizing aggregation it was generally agreed that this would be something cool to attempt.
• Other sites mentioned:
  • Lawrence Journal-World – mentioned by Daniel for the way in which it requires a user to click to display the drop-down menu.
  • Crosscut – as an example of an aggregator site.

That was just part of what was discussed during the session and you can read the full text of the chat as well. Here’s what I was able to record of video from the session.

The next session of the Summer Web Design Camp will be this upcoming Thursday June 11th and Joey Baker will be leading the session on homepage design. Likely to be covered are some radically different approaches to what you include and what is given focus. To read more about next week’s session head on over to the Facebook event and check out the links there. Also, we’d love to have you get started with the conversation in the forum.

As always you can RSVP at the Facebook event or send an email to us and we’ll fill you in with the details.