19 Nov 2008, 12:00
Something I'm wondering about the menu is, I want to keep it's functionality but remove it from the stage of the main site. In a sense I want to try to do one of two things:
a. Have the menu auto-hide (as it does) but auto-hide almost entirely off the stage to where there's very little of it showing, if any.
b. Substitute the drop-down menu with a series of perhaps 6 small icons, that would represent the sub-sections of the site. So if I had a gallery of just landscape art I could have an icon that represented it, and the contact page could be let's say an envelope, etc. I'd much rather do it this way, and for better or worse there could be an alt="" like tag associated with each of the icons so that a popup of information (in some fashion) would allow viewers to know what they're clicking on.
The biggest problem I can see with the icon-driven navigation is that it would have to remain static on every page (as the main menu does now). But since new elements (of the menu) are created via the gallery administration, I don't see how the admin panel could allow the addition of icon navigation elements to be dynamically created on the fly as the menu works now. I love that functionality of the menu, but I wish I could minimize how much space that menu consumes, and the way it consumes it. I like the horizontal menu, but it doesn't look entirely right for some reason (to me) static with large styled boxes around it horizontally across the top of the page. I guess this could be option 3, where that horizontal menu could also have an auto-hide option, but again I don't believe that's possible as of yet.
Just a thought, and of course there's no better place to ask but here.