Getting rid of navigation
I'm playing around with a redesign of poorbuthappy.com, 1 of the problems is that there's way too much navigation:
So after a little sketching and some HTML, I came up with this:
A kind of breadcrumb now serves as the main navigation, showing where you are and letting you go up in the chain. (You can go sideways too by clicking the little arrows, which gives you a dropdown.)
A lot less vertical space taken up, but also less clues towards the navigation. You don't immediately see things like "pictures" and "forums". Which makes it less usable. On the other hand, it's a lot less clutter and space, which I like, and likely makes it more usable. And I do have a nice sitemap at the bottom of each page, which I like and gets lots of clicks, so I'm not too worried about taking away navigation options at the top. It's a bit del.icio.us-like too...
What do you think? I'd love to hear some comments.