Did you ever navigate a website without a single mouse click? Try this one!
Published in: Web Design/Dev
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Tags: Search Engine, Site Navigation, Web 2.0, Web Design
When was the last time you browsed a website and did not click on anything to see the different pages and sections of the site? As far as I can remember, for myself, never!
Today, I was surfing the web to search for help on CSS and designing aspects of navigation menu and found an amazing web site from Institute for Interactive Research @ [Don't Click It] and must say, it’s simply a pleasing experience to browse a website without having to click anywhere. [Actually, you will have to click only once to enter the site. But, that's on the main page which's meant to inform visitors about the purpose of the site]
How does it work?
The entire website is designed using Flash and needless to say, the graphics are impressive and the web site’s design is exceptional. The navigation menu consisting of links acts on mouse hovering on them and navigate to the destination. Every link in the site acts on mouse over events and that’s how it works!
Since this website is meant to gather statistical information about mouse clicks, I don’t have any negative comments on it’s navigation menu. It’s just amazing!
If you visit the site and get impressed, which you will, and want to adapt this design technique in your site, here are some drawbacks of such a technique.
Drawbacks of click less navigation
- You will have to design the navigation menu, at least, in Flash.
- Search engines will not be able to index your site’s content.
- 100% of the visitors on Internet are used to navigate a website with mouse clicks. So, your visitors may find this kind of click less navigation quite unusual.
I hope you have a pleasing experience browsing it and do drop in your comments about your experience with click less navigation.
Binny V A Said,
February 4, 2007 @ 9:01 pm
There is a JavaScript implementation of something like this…
http://labs.mininova.org/noclick/
I have created a GreaseMonkey script for this - it is available at..
http://www.openjs.com/scripts/greasemonkey/
The NoClick GreaseMoney Script
http://www.openjs.com/scripts/greasemonkey/noclick.user.js
Raj Said,
February 4, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
Binny,thanks for those links. While the concept of js is nice and useful in certain ways, having a js in links could be problematic from SE’s point. I think a GreaseMonkey script is better option.
Thanks again.
Binny V A Said,
February 9, 2007 @ 7:42 am
JS will not be used in the links - the examples provided at http://labs.mininova.org/noclick/ will work just as well if you use an ordinary page instead of the alert statement.
However there is a big drawback to using this script - your users will be confused. The users don’t expect ‘auto clicking’ links - so when they hover over a link - they don’t expect to be taken to the next page. So I don’t advice using it.