Dynamic Website Navigation

Dynamic navigation - which technology to use?

Using code allows you to create menus that change depending on which page is being displayed, or which can expand and contract when the mouse clicks on them.

One of the main objectives of your design strategy should be to create a site that can be spidered by search engines, as well as being usable and you need to bear this in mind when choosing your type of navigation.

Sites with a small number of links do not need to bother as they can simply use plain text or image links, however once you have a requirement to link to a large number of pages from your menu, you need a way to group them.

DHTML menus

DHTML is basically the use of scripts to manipulate web page elements using CSS.

Netscape and Internet Explorer both support DHTML but differently, so getting a menu to work well in both Netscape and IE can be difficult.

I have listed a number of sites where you can download free DHTML menu navigation scripts here

Image Maps

Image maps are images with "hot-spots" that contain links. However they are often associated with large images which take a long time to download giving poor usability, and they are not search engine friendly. Many search engines cannot spider the links in the image map.

Flash navigation menus

Flash is an excellent visual tool and allows you to create stunning interactive menus, however once again, Flash (.swf) files cannot be spidered efficiently by search engines, so it is not a good idea to use Flash for menus until Search engine technology advances enough to be able to spider them. Remember that Flash files are binary objects which are in effect files made up of machine code that is not readable by search engines.

Java applets

Java applets can also be used for creating useful and dynamic menus, but usually the applet does not appear until the whole applet has loaded and large applets can take a long time to load. Some Java applets use HREF links on the web page being spidered (where the menu appears) and these will probably be spidered, however other applets are included and whether they are spidered or not depends on whether the search bot is programmed to spider further (probably not!).

Javascript menus

As with Java applets, unless the search engine spiders can pick up HREFs in the links in the JavaScript, they will not be able to spider the JavaScript.

The conclusion of this analysis is that using plain text or image links is best for visibility. If the site is large and there is a need for expandability you should seriously consider DHTML menus as you can keep a site both usable and visible to search engines. This site uses mostly plain text links - but is still very attractive.

Flash menus, Java applets and JavaScript are all excellent technologies, and although may enhance usability, they may sometimes damage your search engine visibility.

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