Indeed, lack of vertical space is an issue for a lot of laptops, where the screen space is more width than height - so users need what height they can get for the actual content. Having the navigation on the side can work well for that, but can cause issues for non-laptops...
Really, I've found sites that just duplicate the navigation at the end to be the best - have the main pile at the top, and then have the most relevant bits also on the bottom so folks can just keep going without having to scroll back up, which is useful regardless of what kind of device you happen to be using. Particularly effective for things like webcomics and blogs, but a bit of creativity could probably apply the principle to just about anything...
On 23/10/13 10:32, Nick White wrote:
On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 04:17:52PM +0530, Arnav Sonara wrote:
Well a number of sites have been doing this a lot lately, the position of the top bar or <div id = "header_outer"> in wikihow.com is *fixed* so even after reading the last line of article one does not need to scroll back up. The top bar provides certain functionality easily like searching, help section, log in etc.
I actually really dislike this trend for websites. For most computers vertical space is the premium, and using extra just for navigation that you won't need except at the end of an article is a waste in my opinion. This is probably less true for large-ish portrait devices like tablets (when in portrait orientation), but in general I far prefer to not have any navigation chrome around when I'm actually reading. Wikihow actually does this even worse than just the green header, as the "Steps" header also becomes fixed when one scrolls through the articles.
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