My website is about our travels. It’s not designed like a blog, but rather like a custom-built website. I use a button with a hamburger menu icon to open the menu in a pop-up.
In this pop-up, I’ve included several menus as “vertical menus.” I also use page groups to structure the website. Now my question: Is it possible to make the page groups in the menu open only by clicking them, and not by hovering the mouse over them? Currently, all the page groups in the menu open when you move the mouse from top to bottom—which is the normal movement. This resulting “endless” menu isn’t very helpful. Does anyone have any ideas? (The question only applies to devices with a screen resolution of 960 pixels.)
As a beginner here, I’d love to hear of good solutions, thanks for asking. I have been toying with a dedicated, extra menu built as a regular page in itself, maybe “Open in New Page” selected on Panel. Each line of that page can easily link to a particular page.
I’m sorry, but the first thing that needs to be done is sort out your website’s logic. Exposing a User to such a long main menu is like screwing nails under their finger nails!
A better way would be to have the years in your main menu and then on the User page they select have a sub-menu representing your categories for that year.
The main menu/navigation is the gateways to sectioned information in your website.
That’s what I meant: “The endless menu isn’t very helpful”… or rather, it’s annoying. However, the main menu for the actual travel journal is organized by years: “2024”, “2025”. But the entries are growing every week over months; that’s the nature of the travel business …
For a short trip the menu looks much clearer. Brasilien
My question is whether I can use a standard menu element (not expanding on its own) or if I have to manually design the menu itself with buttons and pop-ups to make it clearer.
Personally, I would try and redesign the menu as a “visitor journey” rather than providing visitors with an all-encompassing list of links. There are a number of ways to achieve this, through using block visibility, or popups. For example, I would design a set of landing pages for each destination/region. These will effectively work like individual home pages that could feature summary details of each region/feature of that particular destination - think in terms of hotel booking sites - visitors select a main destination from a main navigation. The destination link will take visitors to a nicely designed page containing thumbnails, short descriptions and a link for each region/feature or hotel. Of course, the actual details will depend on what it is you’re promoting (the purpose or intent of the site).
The advantage of this type of structure is that each landing page can be promoted through social media like it was a home page for a specific destination/region.in other words, each landing page acts like an entry point to your website. For those that enter the site through the main home page, they will be able to easily find specific regions/destinations via a much simplified menu structure. From a user experience point of view, this is a much better, and more “human-driven” structure that takes visitors on that essential visitor journey without forcing them to make decisions from a huge menu of options at the outset.
If you don’t want to have in-page links in your landing pages, you could simply design the pages as region/destination pages with images and descriptions, and create a pop-up sub menu on each of those pages. Again, this arrangement becomes part of the visitor journey whilst giving visitors something to see whilst they decide where they want to go to next. Your main navigation would also be included on all your pages so people could select alternative landing pages from anywhere in the site.
The way your site is currently structured makes certain assumptions, such as the visitor knowing where they want to go before embarking on their journey through the site. It’s much better to “take them by the hand” and lead them on a journey of discovery - keeping them more engaged and, hopefully, leading them to a “call to action” that results in a paying customer. The bottom line when designing an effective navigation is ask some simple questions. What do I want visitors to do when they first enter the site? What do I want them to do before leaving the site? And what information will they need to see in between in order to buy whatever it is you’re offering. Answering these questions helps you design the “visitor journey” that you want your visitors to embark upon.
Thanks so much, Stefie, for your detailed and helpful feedback. I’ll definitely take some time to think about your suggestions. (Each destination already has its own landing page.)
Just for a bit of context: I’m not a professional developer. I’ve been an overlander for the past 15 years and work on this site purely as a hobby. The website is simply our personal travel blog and not a commercial project.
Every time I open the Sitely Community, I’m amazed by how beautiful the websites are you can create with Sitely. Nevertheless, my “full-time” job will continue to be traveling, not developing
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