You may have noticed a lack of "Naviagtion Menus" on the site.  It's all part of a hugely unscientific experiment to see if I can build a site which doesn't place the usual emphasis on what we might call "standard" navigation (you won't see the tediously conservative and predictable list of "Products", "Contact", etc).

Yes I have the three links across the top: Home, Site Map and Site Index; but these are quite spartan - and whilst they help you get around, I suspect it'll be pushing some people out of their comfort zones.  This raises the question: am I insane?

For the record: no, I don't believe I am insane. 

Let's say that most people (myself included) have become sub-consciously trained to look-out for links, and feel quite at home cruising around the "construct" of a site, by virtue of the way menus are set out.  But sometimes there's a bit of guess work involved: menu items are usually one or two word affairs - ambiguity is not completely uncommon, and sometimes we look at a menu and can't make immediate sense of it.  This is where we start to enter the realms of Information Architecture, and indeed, Marketecture.

So, in my experiment I'm going to take a different approach:

• I'm going to try and keep my content reasonably well written (as in succinct) and put plenty of links in it.  The idea is that this will provide context, so people will know what I'm on about - they'll know the context.
• For those who (like me) sometimes want to peruse a definative list of pages there is the site map.  A good site map will tell you what pages are available and how they inter-relate to each other.
• Search - a good search engine will help you find stuff (to use the technical term), which links to
• URLs - if I do a search, and get some results back, one of the things I can do is look at the URL and if it's user friendly that will help me figure out if it's where I want to go; so mysite/product?id=3005 is not going to help a lot, where-as mysite/kitchen/widgets/banana-peeler is much more helpful.
• Finally we have my triump of information perusal: the site index.  This is a stunningly unoriginal idea - most books have them (of the technical kind, anyway) but it's not something you see on many websites (in fact I've only ever seen one other and that worked in quite a different way).  The benefits of a site index should be reasonably self-evident.  One of the things I like about it is that it gives you a different way of browsing the site - it actually supports the idea of browsing, you can wonder the indexes lin much the same way you might scan shelves in a second-hand book store on a rainy day.

So - will it work?  Well see.  I'll pass on any findings.  In the meantime please feel free to drop me a line if you're keen (sorry, I don't have comments organised just yet, but we'll get there).