On the Trash Heap of History: Vertical Navigation

Web design is still a new field. Though trillions of dollars of commerce flow annually and millions of man-hours are spent daily online it's only been two decades since web design really began. Web Design is still the wild west and new information about what works and what doesn't is always being discovered. One of the mainstays of early webdesign, the vertical navigation menu, has been found wanting and is slowly being discarded on the net. Why?

Here are 3 reasons:

• It's Not Natural

This might not be so in Japan or China, but the majority of the world reads text left-to-right or right-to-left. Very few languages are situated vertically. As we learned in the previous blog post, the very first thing a user looks at on a website is the top swatch of a website. Using vertical navigation works against the way we've been trained to read from birth.

• It's a Space Waster

If the left of your website has a vertican navigation bar then space for content, opt-in e-mail forms, recent blog posts is reduced. Considering that viewers look at the left side of a website second, this is prime real estate that can't be wasted when a horizontal nav bar will do.

• It's Scientifically Proven


A study performed by Eyetrack III discovered the following:
“While testing several homepage designs, we varied the placement of a navigation element: top (under the flag or logo), left column, and right column.

“Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best — that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration.”

There are always exceptions to the rule, but generally vertical navigation should be avoided unless the content calls for it. One possible use for vertical navigation would be on a very content heavy website that would have long names for the primary links, for example an online medical journal.

Hat Tip: Smashing Magazine, The Case Against Vertical Navigation

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