Hundreds of reflections, thousands of rounded corners and 4 years later, the web 2.0 hype is finally over. I still remember the term being new to me and admittedly our company suffered many designs biased by the trend. However, below (literally) the now widely adopted tools from the era such as RSS, comments, and AJAX asynchrony in RIA’s, lies a trend we gladly use and try to include in most of the sites we make: The Quick-Link Pane.
Its a tough sell and ironically its obviously never charged for, but clients rarely like scrolling to the bottom of their website and finding a purposely contrasting visual element, till’ we list the benefits:
- Its all there, kinda like a visually appealing sitemap
- Helps your SEO, its got low visibility… ok but the links, headers, and bolds are there
- No-nonsense navigation, just scroll down and be worry free
- Include your crosslinks: a blog, relevant sites of the industry, whatever you please
If you read all this and still dont know what I’m talking about here are some of the quick-link panes you may notice in your daily browsing routine:
Quick Link Pane in social news site Digg
International Heral Tribune - Quick Link Pane Web 2.0 trend
gamespot - this Quick Link Pane is more traditional pre-Web 2.0 This case is annoyingly SEO purposed but hey! use it how you please.
