Progress with menus

If you're reading this you should be able to see the results of this lunchtime's efforts to contruct some useful menus.

[ Mar 09 2005, 14:02 ]

The problem

The main reason for wanting a menu system is to prevent pages like this one from ending up with huge long lists of links. There may be a slight negative impact on page-rank, but we'll see. The challenge has been to come up with a way that keeps a kind of central buffer of links that helps you keep a feel fo where you are when you navigate around.

The solution

It was a bit of a head-doer to begin with. I knew there was an simple answer and there is and now, as you can see, menus automattically appear above and/or below the in-line links to the right of the page. The code is simple and can easily be configured to change the number of links displayed or aspects of the system's behaviour.

How search engne friendly this is, is another matter. Spiders proably won't be able to follow links in the menu, but as the crawl older pages they'll find links to more older pages and so on.

The trusty old sitemap can help here of course, as can remembering to make sure any imprtant information is published in a prominent place.

Press release, released

Stop press! MJB finally releases a press release: Instant e-commerce success