[ringo]

Hello All,

I'm working on a new project redesigning a page full of links to various files. Right now, the page is one really long document with links organized by category.

I would like to give the user the chance to choose an item from the categories without having to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page (As is now necessary for some files). I'm thinking about working up a script to provide either drop-down menus or cascading menus to keep all the categories on top, give the page a cleaner look, and eliminate needless scrolling.

Does anyone have any thoughts or stories about which of these options is best? I don't really prefer the look of one to the other, so this is more of a navigation theory question than anything else.

Which (if either) do you prefer? Any ideas other than these?

Thanks.

[Millennium]

Cascading menus seem to be more popular in Web design at the moment.

I'm going to recommend you go with these, and place them on one side of the screen (the right side tends to work better, just because it's closer to the scroll bar). You can then use one of a number of methods to stick it to a certain position in the window, so that the user never has to scroll in order to get at your navigation links.

In IE/Windows you can nail the links down with a JavaScript and absolute CSS positioning; set it so that when the window scrolls, the links are repositioned as appropriate. For Opera, Gecko, and IE5/Mac you don't even need a script; just set position:fixed on the element's CSS. The rest of the position attributes can be exactly the same as the IE/Win version. That allows you to make your IE script even simpler, because you don't have to worry about browser quirks. Just make it IE-compatible and make sure only IE sees it, and you're good to go.

[Macola]

Personally, I hate drop-down menus when overdone, although I'm often forced to implement them for clients.

Why not just add links from a list of all the categories at the top of the page, then add a "back to top" link beneath each group? Using straight HTML also avoids bugs with drop-down menus that are fairly common with certain scripts (especially on Macs).

[ringo]

Thanks for the suggestions.

RE: Why I don't have a long list in HTML...
It's a really long list of files. Right now a user has to scroll way down on the page to get to certain links and a really small font is being used to cram the content into one (long) page.

The intended audience is a group of business users who need fast access to whatever they're looking for. I don't feel like the tiny font and all the scrolling required is user friendly.

The user environment is pretty static, all users have IE on a Windows 2000 machine, so I think I can keep the scripting bugs to a minimum due to consistency of systems accessing the page.

- ringo

[Scarpa]

If you use bookmarks you can list the categories at the top, and then have the user 'jump' to the relevant part of the page. That would be the best solution IMO as it does not rely on anything but HTML.

Or, you could have a list of categories and use Javascript to draw the related links for a category in a shared space when the user rolls over the category.

I hate menus on the web personally.