Web Assist new website

Hey guys,

When you first launched your new website you had a menu that dropped down and had lots of good links and info inside it.
Personally I really liked it.

My question is:

I remember reading you changed it because you had some complaints.

Well I am building a site now and was going to build a menu system like that but I was just wondering what those complaints where?

I tried doing a search but came up with nothing.

Anyways, I like your site and enjoy seeing it's evolution.

I have been around since your company's early days.

It seems that design and organization trends come and go when it comes to websites. I think that we found that the large div dropdowns we had just were not working well for the user experience that we wanted to provide. The idea behind scrapping that setup was to offer a more straight forward way of presenting info and product listings to the user. The information is about the same just organized a little differently.

If you think it is something that your users would benefit from and you like the design of the divs in the dropdowns then you should give it a try. If you would like to go for simplicity then breaking the content out of the menu and onto a page might be the way to go.

I remember that one of the issues was that the menu was so large, you had to roll your mouse across the whole page to roll off of it and once again see the regular page content. Some people find this a pain; for others, it's a non-issue.

Another thing you might want to consider is SEO. This isn't personally my area of expertise so you could research further, but if your keywords are all within the content of your page, then the search engine has to read through all of your links before it gets to that content since the search engine reads top to bottom. On the other hand, if you purposefully want the search engine to hit those links first, then the menu might be a good idea.

Thanks Eric and Anna,

Good community info.

Always interesting to hear what other designers are experiencing.

Rob,

I mimicked the top of the WebAssist site (because I liked it so much) for a radio station site I built recently that did use the HTML dropdowns (although I did not make my dropdowns quite as large. I actually did it using WebAssist's CSS Menu Writer and then making some slight modifications to the code... you can see it here: index.php

Let me know if you need a hand in getting it started and I can look through my style sheets to let you know how to accomplish it.

Regards,

Brian