httpwebwitch - 2:40 pm on Sep 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

About a year ago I started a campaign of getting all our sites to use <ul> <li> <a> menus. The menus are dynamically generated as nested <ul> so that parent levels are "opened" to the current page, showing parents, siblings, children, uncles, but no cousins or nephews. That, combined with a breadcrumb trail, is not only very easy to understand and navigate but also provides very cohesive interlinking.

A good CSS designer can do a lot with an unordered list, it's surprising to see what they can pull off given some pretty boring HTML underneath.

Unfortunately I don't have a good before-and-after case study, because all those sites are getting constant updates and have consistently climbed ranks, so it's pointless to presume what the winning factors were. But I do know that the sites usually get crawled top-down, are well indexed, and have a good top-heavy link structure.

I haven't made a Fireworks-esque images-and-rollovers menu since... about 2002. I do not miss them at all.