I have seen a new trend in web design in the past few months, the vertical slider. The navigation scrolls you to a different part of the same page. and this gives the feeling of traveling through a different part of the website. All good, as long content is cleverly segmented.
I recently went to http://www.wampserver.com/en/, to checkout a specific plugin. The look and feel looks much better, but I could not find where to download add-ons. After 10 frustrating minutes I found out that the plugins could be found in the section "downloads".. although the section was not visible on the page and you had to scroll down.
"Downloads", right, yes of course. Well, it turns out that the user doesn't expect to have to scroll down to find content when using this type of navigation. And with all due respect for the team of designers at http://www.alterway.fr/ I think the previous version was much more user friendly, the current navigation being in my opinion clumsy and not fit for purpose.
A list of websites doing it well can be found here: http://3.7designs.co/blog/2008/04/12-websites-that-slide-and-scroll-with-javascript/
I recently went to http://www.wampserver.com/en/, to checkout a specific plugin. The look and feel looks much better, but I could not find where to download add-ons. After 10 frustrating minutes I found out that the plugins could be found in the section "downloads".. although the section was not visible on the page and you had to scroll down.
"Downloads", right, yes of course. Well, it turns out that the user doesn't expect to have to scroll down to find content when using this type of navigation. And with all due respect for the team of designers at http://www.alterway.fr/ I think the previous version was much more user friendly, the current navigation being in my opinion clumsy and not fit for purpose.
A list of websites doing it well can be found here: http://3.7designs.co/blog/2008/04/12-websites-that-slide-and-scroll-with-javascript/