Yet another web design trend?

A website’s main navigation has always been featured someplace near the top of the page. Nowadays, people are questioning that. So, where should your navigation be placed?

It started a couple of weeks ago with websites such as This is Powazek and Keegan Jones. Great designs but what usability results can this new approach have? For years now, usability gurus such as Jakob Nielsen or Jared Spool have argued that users hate to scroll. Their findings, based on numerous user testing sessions, were the base on which everyone positioned their website’s main navigation either on top of the page, or on its side. It’s what everyone does without spending one minute to think about it and, most importantly, it’s what users expect.

There are times, however, when designers, fed up with doing things the same way over and over again, will try and challenge the state of things. It happened about a year ago when the web saw a massive surge in using the Trebuchet font. Designers were trying harder and harder to break away from the rule of Verdana and Arial so they went for something new. For a while, I’d say around 90% of the websites designed at that time were using Trebuchet. It was something new, different and it followed the “cool” trend. Things eventually calmed down and people started going back to Verdana and for good reason: it is currently the single available sans-serif font (the other one, serif font, being Georgia) that was designed specifically for the web. This provides improved legibility at small font sizes and on the low resolution of today’s monitors. But this isn’t about fonts. It’s about trends. I agree that sometimes a trend can bring something good and useful to the table but I’m not convinced that placing your navigation on the bottom of your screen is one of those trends.

Derek Povazek argues that a website should be optimized for its faithful users, for those that will actually go through the whole content, especially when talking about a content-driven website. Keeping these users in mind it would make sense to serve them the content up front and deal with the navigation later. One small flaw in his thinking: what percentage of the total users actually does go through the whole content? Even the most passionate of your readers might have a moment when for one reason or another the content you are serving on your home page is of no interest to them. Why force them to scroll down a couple of pages? And most importantly, what about your first time visitors? A website can only thrive on a constantly increasing number of visitors. If you’re going to hide your navigation you’d better be sure you can sweep that first time visitor of his feet with just one page worth of content. And that sounds to me a bit like shooting yourself in the leg.

While it might make some sense for a content-driven website to serve the main important thing up-front—its content—and worry about the navigation later, I think that the vast majority of web users are simply too used to having the main links somewhere on the top of the page and that’s what’s really important here. Just like with any other trend, if it’s going to drastically change the way users need to act, I doesn’t stand a lot of chance.

The bottom line is that we’ve been used for years with certain things and these habits die hard. Is it cool to do things a different way and stand out from the crowd? It definitely is and it will bring some controversy your way that could eventually be a good thing. Is it worth adopting this for the years to come? I sincerely doubt it.