Traditionally websites are designed within two columns. The left column for navigation while the right contains the primary content of the site. A lot of established sites such as Amazon and Ebay take this traditional approach and for the most part it works without any problems.
Your average Joe Soap user expects to see a left menu in the same way he expects the site’s logo to appear clickable within the top left of the header and a search box directly adjacent to it. But there has been a shift in recent years to place the menu on the right with the content to the left of it. This is especially evident when you look at the way in which blogs are designed. Very few use left menus anymore. Why?
Resolutions
More and more sites are developed to a minimum resolution of 1024*756. The unfortunate souls who still use 800*600 resolutions (whoever they are) will more often than not have to scroll to read your content if your menu is taking up the primary real estate on the left side of their monitor. If your menu is on the right then you’re accommodating the logical fact that a user wants to read content rather than read a menu when they land on your website. While most developers are beginning to ignore 800*600 design, a simple measure such as placing your menu on the right pane will go a little way in delivering as much as the site to them as possible.
Eye Movement
Since we naturally read left to right, why place a menu on the left? Do I want to read your menu? Nope. I want to read your content.
Browsers
The two most used browser controls are the back button and the scrollbar. By placing your menu to the left of the scrollbar you are placing your menu in a ‘hot’ spot by aligning it with the scrollbar. A lot of people naturally place their cursor next to either their scrollbar or near the back button when they land on a page.
SEO
Loiue from Eire Web Design commented that “Putting the menu to the right, brings the main content closer to the top of the page.This is good when SE displays your page in the SERPs, where meta description is not available, therefor SE will display the first few lines found on the page itself.:
There are probably a few other reasons why right seems better than left. If you know of one then drop me a comment.
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6 responses so far ↓
1 eire web design ireland // Nov 18, 2007 at 10:36 am
Another reason is for SEO purposes.
Putting the menu to the right, brings the main content closer to the top of the page.
This is good when SE displays your page in the SERPs, where meta description is not available, therefor SE will display the first few lines found on the page itself.
For those who prefers to keep the menu on the left, there are few hacks that can be used to keep it below the content but still positioned to the left like the “table hack” and proper use of “CSS” float feature.
2 Cormac Moylan // Nov 18, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Excellent point Louie
3 eire web design ireland // Nov 18, 2007 at 12:39 pm
The menu on the left has its advantages as well, as many users expects the navigation links either at the top of the page or indeed on the left-hand side (the old tradition).
4 Will // Nov 18, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Speed and load times…
Blogs tend to hold 3rd party widgets and gadgets (not just blogs, but bear with me) where the data is usually housed at another site.
And frequently with javascripting, all processing on a page halts until the javascript is completely loaded. Similar wait times apply for java and flash based widgets.
Which means that if the widget was on the left, then the blog would appear not to load / work.
By putting this widget on the right, most of the page (the blog text) would have loaded and is displayed before the widget is in loaded.
In a “traditional” site, all the loading of the menu (on the left hand side) would (should) have been optimised to have loaded quickly.
If a site is developed by an expert (don’t laugh) and is not to have it’s design altered or load 3rd party applications, then the LHS is useful.
If a site is going to have 3rd party apps, or have processing heavy apps, then the RHS is the better location.
Of course if the entire site is a flash based widget, then it doesn’t matter
5 scoby // Nov 20, 2007 at 8:49 pm
It is possible to put the content first in the html source but then use css to display the site with a left menu.
Getting the content to load first is definitely a good idea, browsers that ignore css will still get the most important stuff first.
6 Paul M. Watson // Nov 26, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Scoby is right. It is trivial these days to have a different visual order to your code order
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