As I struggle to create a web design that pleases me and is also not an unpleasant mess for everybody else, I take a look at navbars. Many websites have navbars under their headers. I know this because I've seen it sometimes. Navbars have menus that open on hover or on click. They are the website's structure. Surely my website needs its own navbar like everybody else?
However, after implementing it, I find myself never using it. I don't use my own navbar, and I think that says a lot about navbars. Even though it takes an extra click, I'd rather click on the site title to go the homepage, then click on one of the large icons I placed on the homepage, than use the navbar. Or simply use the search box instead.
I've heard about banner blindness before, but I didn't think it would apply to the navbar itself. Thinking about it, it probably applies to the header entirely as well.
This immense header everyone has on top of their page is therefore nothing but an immense waste of space.
Perhaps the problem is that I didn't put enough effort on my navbar, but honestly I would rather not have a navbar at all. Navbars are very hard to implement. BECAUSE OF SMARTPHONES, OF COURSE. So you website has a dozen webpages, which means your navbar also has a dozen links in it. It looks great on desktop's beautiful wide screen, but then you check it in a narrow viewport and nothing fits anymore.
You need Javascript just to have a navbar. Billions of websites have had navbars since the inception of the web, and yet web browsers still don't have a standard API for you to give it a bunch of links so it can turn into a crossplatform menu. Nothing for search, either, even though the API declaring your search box is actually already available, it's pretty much only used by Google to display the site links search box. I want a search icon in the web browser so I don't need to code my own in the webpage.
But I digress.
Navbars being unseen is kind of problematic since I thought I could use the navbar as a method of discovery. Clearly that won't work if I don't even see the navbar myself. I don't think I've ever seen a navbar in my life when I wasn't explicitly looking for a navbar.
This is just like any menubar in an application. When someone uses an application, they tend to search for features only when they need new features, which means if the application already does everything they need to do, they will never learn about the amazing other features the application could have. You need to deliberately be trying every single feature of an application to figure out everything you can do with it. Complex applications, knowing this, typically introduce a "tip of the day" popup, which gets immediately disabled by users for being too annoying and pointless.
Because headers and navbars appear at an expect position and they are static, users will not look at them. They can't pull attention. Popups, on the other hand, pull too much attention. I'm wondering what I can do to pull more attention to the header without becoming obnoxious.
It could be that some nice images would work, perhaps some photos of cats. I'm not sure how would I give attribution in the header, though. I mean, on desktop, that would be easy, but on mobile... Perhaps some animation could work. Recently, I discovered this neat collection of Javascripts [https://www.mf2fm.com/rv/], and that gave me some ideas for animating text. Maybe if the text was animated, people would look at it.
However, recently I tried adding an animated "featured posts" panel on the sidebar, and I really don't like it. It's very good at catching MY attention, which means it's probably too much, as I already know what posts are being featured. It's "animated" in the sense that five different posts are automatically rotated in a carousel-style panel. Very effective against banner blindness, as I thought it would be, because animation in general pulls a lot of attention, but it's still too much. I need something more subtle. I hope animating the text instead will be a good balance.
It's very important that people at least glance at the header. If they don't, they won't know the site's name.
This is a failure that I have noticed in other websites a lot.
Often, you have a large company selling some product, and, in order to get customers to go to their website, they will start doing some "SEO" practices, like content marketing. They will write articles, or hire a writer and publish it in their website, in order to attract people from search engines. These articles often have very little to do with the product that they are actually selling. I've seen a lot of programming tutorials in websites made to sell some product related to hosting websites, or comparisons between products written by one of the products being compared.
If you're trying to learn how to do X, the only reason you're going to look at the header of a website is if you're looking for more tutorials. It has to be a tutorial website for you to care. Nobody is going to check what products you have for sale just because they randomly arrived there from Google. Well, at least most people wouldn't. I'm sure there is one or two people or do check it.
In any case, because these websites are often incredibly generic and black text on white background, there was one time I had a couple of them opened in separate tabs, and I literally couldn't tell which website I was browsing because I couldn't see the header. They're both, or rather, all practically identical, without any flavor.
It seems they think branding is the header and the color of the links. The rest is just black and white text generated by a Markdown parser.
Because their branding is so weak in their own content, in their own webpages, you often completely forget who they were once you close the tab. They're not Company X, they're just yet another company writing tutorials to get leads. There's a dozen of them.
If the people don't look at the header, will they remember what site they just visited? I'm not marketing expert, but I'd wager you can't be remembered if you don't stand out.