Forum Moderators: phranque
I am associated with a website and we are planning to give it a new look in the home page. I had this debate with my team members on whether we should keep the menu on the right side of the page or should we shift it to the left side of the page.
What opinions do you guys have? Does the menu have any sort of effect on the visitors?
If you want people to see the linkbar first thing and possibly glance through it for relevance before reading your content, the left is probably the best place to put it. If, however, you want users to see your content, read it (as they're probably going to do), then judge whether your site is relevant to them for further information, the right side works best. These two factors tend to come about because people read from left to right, so they'll naturally scan the left side of the page first. Your content, of course, is what they're looking for, but a linkbar on the left side will usually at least catch their eye before they read.
Another option that may be dependent on your particular situation is to have links at the top of the page, under the site header--I tend to favor this design for many reasons, especially since it's compact and doesn't draw users away from the page content (which is usually my focus). I may add a sidebar, but this will usually contain links to relevant content or ads--in other words, things that have a description to be displayed and/or change frequently. If the site has none of these, I often drop the sidebar entirely.
English (reading from L2R): Menu on the left
Arabic (reading from R2L): Menu on the right
If you're focusing on getting the highest CTR for google ads:
English (reading from L2R): Menu on the right with Google ads on the left
Arabic (reading from R2L): Menu on the left with Google ads on the right
hope that made sense.
I'm moving more into three and four column layouts these days and making ample use of those right columns. Site Overlay's show that they get used quite frequently.
