On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 16:24, Simon Marlow wrote:

On 29/03/2010 13:20, Christopher Done wrote:

On 29 March 2010 11:19, Simon Marlow wrote:

Is the footer necessary? I dislike sites that have too many ways to
navigate, and the footer looks superfluous. The footer will probably be off
the bottom of the window in any case, which reduces its usefulness as a
navigation tool.

Footer navigations are a way to provide a bit of a sitemap without
cluttering the top nav, good for SEO, and to provide the user with an
overview of the hierarchical structure of the site on every page.

IMHO, these aren't compelling reasons. Note that already on your page there is an inconsistency between the tabs at the top and the headings at the bottom: I don't know where to look to find the content I want. Put the navigation in one place.

A sitemap: sitemaps are for robots. If you're worried about cluttering up the page, use drop-down menus.

SEO: we shouldn't compromise the usability or appearance of the site for SEO. If we do it right, SEO takes care of itself - and it's not like we care that much about SEO here, we're not competing with other sites to sell you Haskell.

I like something like this footer (though I don't think this is a great one: page-specific wiki actions doesn't belong, and I don't get the "Reports" column). It clearly doesn't serve as main navigation. For me, it's the "where do I go next" collection of links for when I've read the page. I think it can improve usability, not hurt it.

As for SEO, I don't think the concern should be "do we show up high in the ranks?" but rather "does a query in a search engine take you to the most appropriate page?" I've long been frustrated by Google not being able to find good answers to my Haskell-related questions. If there's anything we can do to improve this issue by changing the page layout and structure of haskell.org, then I'm all for it. This in itself is a matter of usability.

Regards,
Sean