Premium designs now offer a sticky menu: it stays at the top of the window as the visitor scrolls, instead of disappearing after the first screen.
The problem it solves
Somebody reaches the bottom of your gallery and wants your contact page. Without a sticky menu they have to scroll all the way back up. Most people will, once. Fewer will do it twice, and a meaningful number will simply leave instead.
It matters most exactly where you can least afford to lose people: on long pages, and on phones, where the journey back to the top is much longer.
How it is implemented
- It shrinks. Once you scroll, the bar becomes shorter with smaller type, so it takes up less of the screen than the full header does.
- It hides on the way down and returns on the way up. Scrolling down means reading, and the bar gets out of the way. Scrolling up usually means looking for navigation, and it comes back.
- It has a solid background. Semi-transparent bars over photographs are illegible about a third of the time, depending on the photograph.
- Anchors account for it. Jumping to a section no longer puts the heading underneath the bar, which is the classic bug in every hand-rolled sticky menu.
Why it can be turned off
On a short site it is pointless: if the whole page is two screens, nobody loses the menu. On Modernist it also works against the design, which is built around uninterrupted space.
It is a setting, off by default on the designs where it is not obviously an improvement.
The mobile version
On a phone the sticky element is a compact bar with your name and a menu control. The full menu opens over the page. That work is covered separately in mobile menus, improved.
Worth repeating that most first visits to an actor site are on a phone, as discussed in website statistics, so mobile is where this feature earns its keep.
Related
Menu order matters more when the menu is always visible: the first three items get almost all of the clicks. If your menu is long, consider two-level menus.
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