Menu usability review - CMS Made Simple

Hi,

I'm working on integrating CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/) into a website.

I wondered if anyone would be kind enough to give me some feedback on the menu system?

The text menu at the top, that reads 'Mortgage advice, Conveyancing' etc. uses the default menu behaviour that comes with the system.

site here (http://81.21.72.178:81/jdgall/)

If you click on one of those links, you'll notice that once you land on the linked page - the link to that page disappears - i.e. if you are @ home, then the home link disappears.

I understand that this is apparently good usability practice, but I'm not sure if I just find it plain annoying.

What do you all think?

Kind regards,

Gary

It's not actually particularly good usability advice to remove the link altogether - I think you've read something and taken it a little too literally. Basically, you don't want any self referencing links, but you do want a consistent navigation interface.

What you're supposed to do is remove the hyperlink but keep the bit of text there, clearly formatted so it doesn't look like a link.

Since we're on the subject of menu usability I'd add that using > between your menu links at the top makes it look like a breadcrumb, which it isn't, which is confusing. And the buy/sell/let menu breaks horribly at higher text sizes.

Hope that helps.

Hope that helps.

Thanks Pennimus, yes that helps a great deal :thumbsup:

If you look at the page with styles off, you'll see that each click brings up a H3 that tells you which page you are on - I guess my css spoilt that feature, but it still seems kind of freaky anyway.

I'm still a novice with this particualr CMS (and not much of a programmer either) but I'll take alook at the .tpl file and work out a way to make the current page link inactive, but visible.

Thanks for the heads up re: the 'breadcrumbs' and the text resizing issue too - much appreciated :)

Gary