Having a selected state
March 11th, 2008
How important is it to have a “selected”, or “current” state for your navigation you might ask? Extremely. Ok, and how often do you see sites that leave this feature out, only to cause a huge thumbs-down for usability? Far, far too often. So often in fact it gives me chills, and nightmares thinking about the reasoning the designer might go through when deciding to opt out…I only hope their reasoning does not have anything to do with being lazy.
This might not seem like much of importance if you are using proper and clear headings, and breadcrumbs (which I myself need to add to the site), but trust in me, go that extra step and add it in. I hate to say it, but I think that a lot of it has to do with lack of programming knowledge, or sheer and utter laziness. Either of which is not a valid excuse, and you should have a corner of your “designer chip” (Boy Scouts will get that one…) ripped off. Seriously though, you go through all the trouble to make such a nice looking site, and leave off this one minor detail that just ruins the whole damn thing! Stop!
Ok, how do I achieve this?
Well, there are tons and tons of options once you have decided to walk towards the light. Most web blogs offer this feature (WordPress is one) out of the box, or with little effort. WordPress has on their site a page that describes how to achieve this must have, and it is pretty well documented. The article is pretty straight forward for PHP users, but the general practices can be applied across languages if you use ASP, or .NET for example.
- Posted at 10:10 am in development
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