Content Structure

Should I put my content before my nav?

[madmatt69]

Hi everyone,

I'm re-designing my site using CSS and have made it in such a way that my <div> with all the content is at the top of my page, just under the head tag. After that, my navigation divs are called in.

Now my navigation divs have lots of keyword links i.e - "blue widgets" "green widgets" "overseas widgets" etc.

Do you think it's better to keep the navigation at the top of the doc, or to put the content there? I'm thinking its better to have the content at the top.

Just curious if anyone has any opinions of which works better.

Thanks!

Matt

[kstprod]

matt,

I'm no expert, but in my opinion, content definately does better as close to the top of the page as possible. I also have some pages that are set up with css, just like you describe, and I'm very happy with my #3 spot. :)

Good luck!

[batdesign]

From a purely accessibility viewpoint, I would always put content divs before nav divs, and even better, have a 'skip to nav' link at the top of the page in the stylesheet for old browsers and text browsers.

From googles viewpoint, I haven't found my CSS sites suffer as a result of this method. I think if anything, google seems to prefer the content to be as near the top of the code as possible. If in doubt, you could put a few main internal links at the top of the source, such as section links, and put the full nav at the bottom. This works well if you have say a tab menu at the top, with a standard side menu.

Anyone else that has noticed a drop in ranking due to css div layout I'd be interested though.

[madmatt69]

Thanks guys - I just put so much time into it, and then thought - wait a minute..Maybe this isn't a good idea!

The thing is I'm already doing realyl well with my rankings, and so I'm afraid of making any changes that might make me slip in the serps.

I'm uploading the updated site right now :) I guess I'll be able to tell of any traffic differences over the next week or so.

Thanks again for the input -

Matt