I just noticed that you've taken care of this with links at the footer of the page. kind of "next page" links.
Actually that was a last-minute add-on. My wife (who happens to be a usability expert for the State of Connecticut) was helping us to enter in some content a couple weeks before launch. She's the one who pointed out many of the usability issues the site had (and still has in some areas). This modification was her idea (I always try to give credit where it is due :). I'm not happy with the sibling links being at the bottom there (and I just remembered that I have to include the sibling links in a few other areas of the site where I forgot to put them), but overall it works and we have gotten good responses from it. It was also her idea to put in the bread crumbs (which I wrote my own version that allows me to have empty dmNavigation nodes for grouping information, yet still have a clean bread crumb trail) and landing page sections.
What I'd like to do is find a better way to work with that right navigation or just pull it out all-together. During our recent QA we found that most users seemed to prefer the top nav (for major links) and the bread crumbs. Many people (including myself) believe that bread crumbs should be used on sites that have 3 levels deep (or more). It helps users to always know where they are on your site. Bread crumbs also work well for people coming into the site from a Google search (I know many of you already know this, but you'd be surprised how many people don't until you explain it).
You probably already noticed that when hitting a landing page we present the user with a list of section links (child links). This new addition went over really well during recent QA results.
You must realize that months before I started any CF coding there were initial QA tests on different demographics (which I'm not allowed to be involved in, nor do I want to. Trust me, its better not to hear the criticism straight on). The users were given html pages to walk through using a navigation only provided on the right (At the time there was no thought to implimenting bread crumbs, landing page section links, and sibling links). Now that there are navigation links that do not include the right nav, the responses have been much higher. So far people have preferred NOT to use the right nav.
So now I ask myself: Since this area is high real-estate for the hospital marketing department, do I pull the navigation system and free-up the area for better use? The marketing department is doing more research on different user groups before they give me a final answer (and I believe they are involving a third-party company who has not been tainted by the site yet :).
-Jeff C.
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