The problem with many of the dropdown menus found today on websites is that they are typically heavy javascript which presents the following drawbacks:
- Search Engine Bots indexing your site cannot follow the links and subsequently index those pages. Bots will only follow links that are presented as a “standard href”. The majority of menus found have all links in javascript and stop any chance of the bot going on to these pages and indexing them.
- Javascript Menus have a Heavy Footprint, meaning that it’s a lot of code in the js files which increases the download time. This is especially true if you have a site or application that builds the menu on the fly.
DCG has implemented and evaluated a number of open source menu options before finding OpenCube. This tool has allowed us to build web applications and websites using a dropdown menu that is highly configurable and uses the standard “href” tag. This allows search engine bots to easily access and index those pages. This CSS based dropdown menu system has a much lighter footprint and as a result, it is much easier to code when making it dynamic.
DCG takes it a step further with web applications using CSS based dropdown menus that are dynamic. This mean the menu options a user sees are based on their access/user roles. More importantly, we give the capability to distribute access to content and menu items to our customers so they can be self-sufficient and internally manage access to their web application content. This type of control is inherent to DCG’s custom hosted applications. Contact us for more information.