Again and again I’ve run across experimental and creative ways to navigate a page. I’ve uncovered side-scrollers, one-page vertical scrollers, parallax scrolling, animation, story-telling, and even horizontal scrolling within horizontal scrolling (and the list goes on). These new types of navigation systems can give web sites an exciting and engaging way to captivate users, forcing them to interact differently with content, experiment, or be taken on a journey through your web site. But be careful, because something new and different can often confuse or scare users away.
More traditional styles of navigation are comfortable and expected to users, enabling them to easily guide themselves through your content. By steering your users in a non-traditional style, you can risk losing your audience. For this reason, it’s vital that your navigation remains effective. A non-traditional navigation needs to be smart, thoughtful, and content appropriate. An e-commerce site probably wouldn’t benefit from a single page scroller, because of it’s high-volume of information. But a smaller scaled portfolio or promotional site could potentially benefit from a more dynamic style of navigation. If you are in a specific design, illustration or web field, giving your users a new way to get around can be a great way to show off personal style, technique and skill.
Want to experience it for yourself? Check out these examples of creative navigation below:
Nike Better World
This site uses parallax scrolling to create a dynamic site with depth. Just scroll to explore and animate.
Jax Vineyards
This site uses a mixture of vertical and horizontal scrolling, for a clean, minimal look and feel. Constant top navigation is smart and let’s users interact easily with the site and side. Scrolling arrows are large and easy to maneuver.
Ben The Body Guard
This web site takes you on a journey, once you figure out about its vertical scrolling feature. Follow Ben along the dark streets to figure out all you need to know.
Youzee
This vertical scroller takes you step by step. Just click the button on the home screen to get started. Use the icon driven nav at the top or scroll on through each page.
crushlovely
With a constant navigation on the left, it’s easy to get around this vertical scrolling site. Each “page” is broken up vertically with a different color theme.
Polecat
This is a vertical stroller that allows you to jump between pages with a simple top navigation.
With new developments in screen sizes and devices, the fold has become practically outdated. In web design, the “fold” is known as the imaginary line on a screen that designates what content is visible to a viewer without scrolling. If you’re curious, the term, “fold” originated from the traditional newspaper, where the most important content and images were printed above the paper fold. This rule helped gain maximum attention from the reader and made sure essential information was always visible. The same goes for web design, you want to make sure a viewer has visual access to the key info on your site within the first five seconds of reaching the page.
Paul Barbera is an Australian born photographer who travels the world taking on commercial assignments and ongoing projects. One of his side projects, titled 
