Ebook: Constructing Usable Web Menus

Just menus? Yes. This book focuses on a single, vitally important task that confronts everyone who builds web sites for use by people: how to code and present menus that are easy to understand and use, that convey what users need to know about the many paths they can take to get to the information they want, in a variety of technologies. Every web site has a menu (trust us-we looked for a professional site without a menu, and came up empty). Some sites have two, three, or more menus on the same page. Menus give users a simple way to deal with the dozens, hundreds, even thousands of options (or more), ideally sorting those options into understandable divisions people can choose with some confidence that they'll end up more or less where they intended to go. In this book, we'll show you how professional sites organize content, present options, and use a wide array of technologies for navigation. Sometimes these approaches work well and serve as excellent models for your own navigation systems. Sometimes? Well - nobody's perfect! We'll walk you through an extensive range of different menu code that can be easily downloaded from http://www. glasshaus. com/, and adapted to your own needs, taking all the hassle out of menu coding.

When developing a web site, one of the most important things to consider is the navigation menu, to allow your users to find their way around it. It needs to usable, informative, and well implemented, but this can take time. This book will take all the hassle out of implementing web menus, in whatever style and technology you wish, by providing full code samples, along with walkthrough tutorials on how they work to allow easy customisation for your own needs. This book covers: a. Guidelines on designing usable web menus, with 12 common-sense rules to follow b. Information Architecture for menus (including identifying your target user), and user testing c. Easy to Follow tutorials on building menus with HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Flash d. Advanced tutorials on dynamically populating menus from XML and databases with server-side scripting, including PHP and ASP e. Extensive Web support including fully adaptable downloadable code for your own use, and a gallery of working menu examples. From the Publisher This book is for intermediate to advanced web professionals who need to implement a navigation menu on a web site as quickly as possible, with the minimum of hassle. About the Author Andy Beaumont is a freelance interactive developer/designer based in central London. As a firm believer in the "sharing of knowledge" ethos that has made the Flash community so strong, Andy writes Flash tutorials for the likes of pixelsurgeon.com and Computer Arts magazine, teaches Flash and ActionScript at Mac Uni in London, and runs a personal Flash help site. As something of an ActionScript mercenary Andy has worked with many top design agencies including magneticNorth, Conkerco and Broadsnout. Dave Gibbons is a writer and web designer from Beaverton, Oregon, US. He recently worked for five years as a writer, Web/Intranet Designer and programmer, and usability tester at Intel.When not losing sleep over proper menu design, Dave writes humor ("humour" in the rest of the English-speaking world), novels, and screenplays. Jon Stephens is a site developer, writer, and consultant living and working in Scottsdale, Arizona, Jon Stephens works with JavaScript, PHP and in producing technical documentation for area firms. He's an original member of CNET's Builder Buzz developers' site, and has served there as a Community Leader since 1998. Jon has co-authored two books on HTML and JavaScript for Wrox Press.