On 29 March 2010 11:19, Simon Marlow
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. According to the W3C, headings are easily navigable with a screenreader; as someone using assistive technologies I'd get something like: Welcome to Haskell.org Events Learning Headlines Latest Packages Quick Links Download Community Wiki Reports We can get rid of it but I think it's a useful thing.
If we want a tree of links for navigation, maybe the tabs at the top could be drop-down menus, or there could be a menu sidebar.
A side bar on sub pages sounds good.