Refining Menus
As I audit my main site I am updating some of the menu options. An experimental page where I have made majot changes is the Life and Times of Sir John de Botetourt.
It may be over-kill and not understood by the average visitor as they are not likely to venture far from the page that they originally land. The mobile menu does not need a graphic if that graphic is displayed near the top of the mobile rendering. In fact having the same graphic looks a little messy.
About link does not need to be on all pages. Nor does the Contact link.
The Expandable drop-down menus are not likely to be used by the casual visitor as they will not understand that they are there and they will not appear on a mobile device.
Menus can be taylored to the screen resolution. A menu that a mobile user will see can be quite different to that of the desktop view.
When there is a lot of "quoted" or cited text I may wish to put this in the Left Overlay Menu.
Some of the history pages have a redirect at the server. This is because I had multiple pages explaining what I was trying to do. This resulted in the "Going in Circles" comment - which was valid.
What I have done on this page
I have transfered the menu structure from the Life and Times page.
The menu options are now in the mobile menu and in the drop-down menu. For a mobile page such as the Timeline page on my main website I want to add some sections that only display when the page is viewed on a mobile device. These sections are accessed from the mobile menu.
I have removed the image from the overlay menu to give more space for the on-page menu items. I have also done this on the Botetourt life page. The page menu items are for the list of monarchs and the selection of the timeline by century. The history pages are not really condusive to be viewed on a mobile device and the exercise is mainly for my audit of the pages.
Limitations
When adding page links the link text has to fit in the width of the overlay menu - 200px
Developing this menu style on a "live" page messes the statistics n Google Analytics. This may be a moot point when Google officially drop support for Universal Analytics in July. On the other hand this may just Google trying its users to get up to speed and complete their migrations by that date. They have not been totally consistant to date. I have reverted back the the tracking ID that I was using originally.
Page Links
These are links that take the visitor to specific places on the viewed page. This is opposed to other pages on the website. The menu links are designed to mirror those that are in the drop-down menu on the desktop and tablet rendering.
This is where the "over-kill" comes into play. Most visitors are not going to understand the all the menu options that I have built into the design. Much of this is for my own use.