Look at any “Web Competition” or “Award Winning” website and you will notice something strange about them. Chances are you have never seen anything like them or they are so simple and strange you wonder why they work. The thing is, they were probably created via design over status quo. What I mean by that is, most people use another person’s website as an example of what they want theirs to be. What this does however is it limits the creativity of the designer. The project yields  a version of the example website, which was actually a version of another person’s site. This leads to the clones we all see in web design throughout the world wide web. Not necessarily a bad thing, but are websites even designed to be logical to the western brain? Probably not, they were only designed to work.

In my experience with site design I would say that the menu is typically the thing you want noticed but last in succession. In terms of relevance you want people to notice the header first (top portion of site), then the content, then the menu so that they can explore further.  The common practices in website design are not necessarily correct but we do them because people are used to seeing them done that way thus the pattern continues. Initially website design was done by coders who were not trained in design or layout principles. This led to ugly websites with pages that were functional but not aesthetically pleasing (many still exist out there). That is why menus dominate the top  and left of web pages (I try my best to make mine subtle like www.gdyer.com).

To break from this seems like a huge deal to people because we are now trained to “look” for the menu at the top or the left. Imagine a nice magazine layout that demands us to flip the page or jump to another page via the bottom or right-hand side (where it rightfully belongs). For informational sites this would be an advantage since the viewer would have to scroll past relevant info to get to that navigation. Not everyone would agree with this but as a designer this would open up so many possibilities with layout without having to tackle the ugly horizontal bar at the top of websites or on the left.  Think about it.