Get the nav-strip back

Architectural Review, The, June, 2005 by Sutherland Lyall

We don't often look at studenty websites, Matthew Jones always excepted and his is a grown up case. So it was with some trepidation that I took a look at the portfolio site of Wisconsin-Milwaukee university student Jonathan Goldstein at www.uwm.edu/~jwg. It is an interesting site because it contains the sort of extremely clever and imaginative design you expect from students these days all drawn immaculately. But navigation here is a bitch because Goldstein does away with menus across the top for all but the home page. And he has forgotten to provide a way out. Crime three in the web designer's blue book after non-adjustable text size and slowness is forgetting to have a Back button. Navigation to a page is partly by clicking on a heading but for the interesting bits, the designs, you are presented by a grid five boxes wide by eight deep. Click on various ways of organising the hidden material (erm, something odd there) and different groups of boxes are highlighted in several shades of blue. Naturally you hit on one which hasn't been highlighted and up comes a big explanatory doodle. Confused? Yup. OK, let's move on. You can hide the translucent navigation strip at the left. But when you do, you have to guess how to get it back again. Stop, you command, is all this not just nitpicking? You bet it is. Because if the navigation of a site is at all obscure, as this is, nobody except your mum is going to look at the images however good they are.

Sutherland Lyall is at sutherland.lyall@blinternet.com