Effective website content management is a concern that all website designers face. Achieving the best web design in College Station Texas demands an understanding of various ways content can be controlled on a website – and which method is best. Accordion menus are one way to handle large amounts of content on one web page; while they are appropriate in some cases, they are not always the best choice. Knowing when to use an accordion is the trick for making beautiful music with any website design.
What is An Accordion?
The accordion was designed to be a collapsible menu for organizing large amounts of content on a single web page. They include top-level categories that are expanded by the user with a click of the mouse. Beneath the “folds” of the accordion is the content for that category. Collapsed, the page is shorter and more compact with all content still there, under the folds, rather than spread over additional pages. Although this seems beneficial on the surface, there is actually much debate by the best web design companies in College Station Texas over the use of accordions and if they actually help website readers.
Why Use An Accordion?
Accordion drop-downs make viewing a lot of text and content at once less intimidating,\ and can be a part of good web design in College Station Texas. Sometimes the “wall of text” look is unavoidable on web pages that contain a high amount of text-based content; breaking it up enables readers to more easily absorb such information. With an accordion menu, viewers simply click on the heading they need and the content expands below. When they are done, they can close it again or leave it open. Using this type of menu for page content puts the viewer in control of how they prefer to read the page.
Not Always The Best Choice
Despite shortening excessively long web pages and allowing viewer control of reading, many of the experienced College Station Texas web design companies find this technique may not create the most efficient web design. Based on analytics research, accordions can prevent rather than help readers to see all of the content hidden beneath the folds. In order to use accordions, content must be divided into categories, which may be distracting for the overall impact of the collapsed content. Ironically, they work better for short pages with less information to collapse.
A navigational menu work well because users are given the choice of general topics on different pages. With an accordion menu, many web design companies have found that readers only look at the fold header and often skip the content beneath it if the label doesn’t appear relevant, which means important information may be passed over. It wouldn’t be missed if readers were scanning along a single, scrolling page. Add to this the fact that research has shown that viewers prefer to scroll down a page rather than click around it primarily because they are looking on a mobile device. This could cause accordions to work against good web design.
The consensus from the best College Station web design professionals who have experience with accordion menus is to use this content-handling tool when there is a large amount of content to fit onto one page. Otherwise, the current web design advice in College Station based on actual websites using this technique is that hiding too much information defeats the purpose of including such information and may not achieve the desired results!
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