grad school page menu discussion

A page of HTML is worth a thousand words, so here is a discussion page of ideas for the navigation menus in the left column of the grad school web pages. I reverse-engineered this, starting with the idea that someone looking at a single "Fast Fact" sheet might not want to go where the browser's "back" button goes, but might want to jump to another part of the site. But at the same time, it seemed disorienting to offer too many choices... so one page led to another.

My general idea is that all of the pages in the "grad web" should have a narrow "shortcut" menu on the left, but the menu would be slightly different on each page. They would all be anchored with "grad home" at the top and "unc home" at the bottom. In between they would give a sense of the page's place in the overall "grad web" by showing abbreviated names for two or three pages "above" the current one, and in some cases a page or two "below" it. (About six items max.)

Take a look at the examples below and tell me what you think.

Since the "grad web" never will be strictly linear/hierarchical and the goal is to keep this menu narrow and simple, the idea of "above" is somewhat arbitrary.

I do think there also should be a "site map" of what I'm loosely calling the "grad web," a relatively simple text-mostly page listing all the pages the grad school has a hand in. This would be a good organizational tool for all of us as we build the site, and in the end it would be a navigation device for users who "remember seeing something somewhere." But I'm not sure how many pages should have the "site map" as one of their menu items. For now I'm tempted to just have it on the top-level pages (home, admission, funding, students)

I'm just guessing that 14 characters (including blank spaces for indentation) would be the maximum for a menu item to avoid having the menu names wrap to a second line within the column. This requires compromises, such as"student services" becoming "students," and "unc funding sources" becoming "unc sources" or "unc grants."

(By the way, I set the font color to gray and the background to blue just to make things visible without the background gif.)

---- Bob