[thelist] general trend with primary buttons on drop down menus

[aardvark]

we have found that our clients often make up their own mind about how 
they want the top-level item in a fly-out to work... so we provide 
them a way to do what they want without penalizing the site... BTW, 
we call them "fly-outs" because the term "drop-down" still makes many 
people think of select menus...

let's say our menu is:

About
- Our People
- History
- Driving Directions
- Contact Us

in this example, About is the item in the navbar that, when hovered, 
reveals the other 4 items as the fly-out menu...

in our cms (we use our own, QuantumCMS), the About page lives at 
/About, and the History page lives at /About/History... our 
navigation system is built based on the site structure and this 
reflects how the pages are organized...

sometimes /About has loads of content...

sometimes /About has little or no content, so we turn it into what we 
call an index -- it shows the title and summary of each page below...

sometimes /About is just a 301 redirection to /About/People... the 
risk here is that we have to get agreement on where it should 
redirect...

all of those options are in the wild for us, and none of them seems 
to have negatively impacted a site in its search engine ranking... 
the human-readable URLs for each page help, too...

remember, a 301 doesn't tell the search engine to see two pages as 
one, but to note that one page is permanently moved to another 
location and not to index the redirecting page... that's good 
practice and worth doing in this context...

On 21 Jan 2010 at 22:23, Bob Meetin wrote:

> Okay, aside from the fact that not everyone loves dropdowns, what is the 
> general trend with the first button of a dropdown?  Should it be a link 
> or should it simply activate the menu?
[...]
> Would there be any reason to create a 301 redirect to train the search 
> engines to see the two as one?