Menus are the main way that users find their way around online content. Several types of menus are common in online content, and you can use these individually or in combination:

• Top and bottom menu bars. Menu bars along the top or bottom of a page of content are intuitive and familiar to users. The bar may have drop-down menus that appear when the user selects a category to show the choices within it. Using a ‘sticky’ navigation bar allows the menu to remain visible regardless of how far the user scrolls down. More complex sites may have several menu bars, such as
  • a top menu bar that contains information about the organisation
  • a main menu bar with information by topic
  • a bottom menu bar that contains information about the site, permissions, and so on.

• Sidebars. Vertical menu bars that go along the left or right side of the screen are flexible tools, which can hold more items than top or bottom menu bars because users can scroll vertically indefinitely. Sidebars have a useful role in housing content that is organised differently from the rest of the material and its hierarchy. For example, if the top menu bar is topic based, the sidebar might highlight the most important, most popular or most recent content. Sidebars can also show content in alphabetical order. This is helpful when the sidebar holds an extensive list of similar items that would be difficult to group in another way.
• Menu icons. The menu appears when the user selects the icon. The menu icon may be
  • 3 horizontal bars (often called a hamburger icon); this is usually placed in the homepage banner and produces a drop-down menu
  • a sidebar arrow, which extends a menu from the left of the screen.

  Expandable menus have the benefit of creating a cleaner, less cluttered site, and freeing up space to be used for other purposes. However, the trade-off is that site contents are not immediately apparent to users, because this information is hidden behind the menu icon or sidebar arrow. Expandable menus are most useful for mobile platforms.