Archive for November, 2009

Navigation in Rotating Banners

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Just a short post on the use of navigation in banners. This was after one of my clients made the very valid point that they looked intrusive. I restyles the navigation to small squares which hopefully solved that but thought that my ideas on why banner navigation is a good idea might be interesting: -

  • The banner provides a highly visual view of a product or service which is likely to catch the eye of a casual browser.
  • If the banner changes while they are reading it and deciding whether to interact with it you have a problem that they would have to wait for the cycle to come round again. In practice they never do! They either look for what they are interested in elsewhere in the site or forget about it and go elsewhere in the site or to another site.
  • In any of the cases above, you have missed the opportunity to interact with the client on something that has interested them, when they are interested in it, and may therefore have lost them as a potential client.
  • By adding in a way to navigate backwards in the banner, you give them a renewed opportunity to read and to click the banner link
  • The indication also gives a casual browser the ability to see that the banner will change, if they want to watch it.
  • The disadvantage is that it can look intrusive if not well styled.

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