I’m playing around with a redesign of poorbuthappy.com, 1 of the problems is that there’s way too much navigation:
So after a little sketching and some HTML, I came up with this:
A kind of breadcrumb now serves as the main navigation, showing where you are and letting you go up in the chain. (You can go sideways too by clicking the little arrows, which gives you a dropdown.)
A lot less vertical space taken up, but also less clues towards the navigation. You don’t immediately see things like "pictures" and "forums". Which makes it less usable. On the other hand, it’s a lot less clutter and space, which I like, and likely makes it more usable. And I do have a nice sitemap at the bottom of each page, which I like and gets lots of clicks, so I’m not too worried about taking away navigation options at the top. It’s a bit del.icio.us-like too…
What do you think? I’d love to hear some comments.
Peter Van Dijck 
Nice – a couple of things –
It’s a little disorienting for me to see words with first letter capitalized and others not-
So the m in my in “My profile” and “My friends” is capitalized. Also “Minca, Columbia”. But the others words “picture” and “new forum post” are not. So Colombia in the title of the page is capitalized, but in the breadcrumb above – it is not. Looks sloppy/confusing to me.
Also, the use of singular “picture” bothered me – it would feel more familiar as a plural. The singular sounds too database-y.
Thanks Gabe :)
I did something similar to that before but in the end I gave up because with those little dropdowns you can change the entire context, and while doing that everything to the right will change making it confusing for the user. It might work for filters but I guess that in the end it’s just too confusing for navigation. Like, what do you do when you change a dropdown? will everything to the right be cleared? do you retain context as if you were just changing a variable?
I’m with Gabe, I found it unsettling with the Capital/no capital, what he said.
I read your question a few times just to be clear as to what your asking.
IMHO I see no connection between the name poorbuthappy and what looks like a history page of Minca or some kind of travel page.
If I’m looking for travel I need to know up front what your site offers. Hotel, car rental, cabins. I need consumer reviews of selected sites. I need maps or good map links to the destination. I need a selection at least of countries to click on. I need pictures. Gosh, not to be hard on you but I like the parrot and pictures are always nifty when visiting a site. Unless it’s forums or something like that. For travel, spectacular pictures are needed.
It looks to barren to me and I’m not going to necessarily type in a search box. Why? Because there is nothing interesting about that plain little box that inspires me to type anything in it. I would feel like the start page is so bland I’d be further disappointed with what comes up from the next page.
You need, if this is a travel site. Good Deals, Romantic Places, Exotic surroundings, Peaceful and Relaxing destinations. I’d rather see what others have experienced when traveling so I have an idea of the truth of that destination/hotel/cabin. How hard was it to get there, etc. Was the service good, the food.
So although you have the words, Forum I’m not clicking it because it doesn’t look interesting. You have the word Travel Guide but I’m not going to click it because it really doesn’t tell me much. Pictures, well since there are no thumbnails of interesting ones to make me want to see more I’m not clicking that either.
There is a web page on the psychology of website creation that explains the way people first look at your page. The eyes travel in a F shape. They don’t read it all, they look for key sentences and words. I suggest you google some sites about this topic and try out some of what they suggest.
I have done some web pages and sorry but my site is down right now as I’m changing the pictures on it. I do photo restorations and have done some original logos, tags and web sites. I’ve been glued to my computer for 15 years. I’m saying this so you know I’m not just some uninformed drive by idiot. So it is with gentle suggestion that I suggest you research more and ask again for reviews which are maybe painful ( we are so egotistic aren’t we, giggle) but so informative.
I can see some good things you can do with your page to make it more interesting. I’ll have my web page back up in a few weeks. So much to do so little time. Right?
http://s346.photobucket.com/albums/p414/asassyvic/
A question on the drop-downs – will they contain siblings, or children?