Google Sites add Nav Bar Dropdowns
Quietly and unannounced Google has added a much needed feature to its horizontal navbar element from within Google Sites: Horizontal navigation drop-down menus. Quite why these weren’t included in the initial roll-out of the horizontal menu earlier this year isn’t clear, but this new feature is much welcome and very needed by anyone that has more than a handful of pages to their site.
Somewhat rudimentary, it nonetheless adds an extra dimension to site navigation and bolsters the argument for the use of Google Sites, particularly in a corporate environment. Background colour and text colour of the dropdown menus are changeable so that they’ll fit the site’s colour scheme but there are a couple of issues that should have been addressed.
Firstly, the background colour is just one solid block of colour (albeit with a 1 pixel white border around the whole submenu, which is helpful to visually separate it from underlying content) but with no border per item that would have allowed greater visual clarity and a more polished look. Secondly, the hover colour can’t be set and is inherited from the main horizontal menu, which is fine except that if you wished the dropdown to have a complimentary colour scheme (say a black background with white text, if the main menu had a white background with black text) then the menu item, when moused over, will then disappear from view — which means, in reality, that the colours of the dropdown have to be similar to those of the main menu. Not a huge drawback but one that could easily have been rectified with a little thought beforehand.
However, it’s very nice to see that there is a small time delay when the mouse moves away from the dropdown menu. Probably only 300 milliseconds, but it makes the submenu very user-friendly. A nice touch, even though it’s not programmable. So the good news is that a much needed feature has been added and one that is simple and quick to implement, and I shall be using it right away with client sites.
But… this is Google and not some backstreet developer working in his spare time, so resources should not be a problem, and it beggars belief that progress is so slow and clunky. It’s also worth noting that a couple of weeks ago a very strange thing happened to the horizontal menu in Google Sites; the “Horizontal navigation selected text colour” option simply stopped working. Not just on my sites but across the whole of Google Sites. Google staff wrote on a help forum that a bug had occurred but plainly this was because they were introducing the new dropdown menu feature (which necessitated new code) and were covertly beta testing across the whole of the Sites’ system. Why would any professional IT team do that? It does seem that the team that works on Google Sites is either not full-time or they have no one to really answer to, as the potential of this feature of Google Apps is enormous but is almost overlooked by Google itself, and is certainly looked down upon by web professionals who just aren’t aware of what’s on offer.
With better IT management, better marketing, and a more mature product, Google Sites could take on the corporate web sector and make a massive gain on the competition. Why isn’t this the case? I don’t know either.
