Reconsider mixing anchor links and pages in website navigation
There is an odd quirk with the design of the new navigation sidebar on the support portal:
In the designs for the support section page, I have proposed grouping the individual sub-pages into categories. To help facilitate navigation, there are corresponding nav-items for each of these categories in both the sidebar nav and breadcrumb which function as anchor links.
In the attached designs, these groupings are:
- Getting started
- Privacy and security
- Circumvention
- Other features
- Encountering issues
- Miscellaneous
A similar pattern is used on the current support portal, where the categories are listed in the sidebar and represented as H5s in the body. However, in the final design of the new support templates, we've ended up mixing two different types of nav-item together:
- Anchor links for support section categories.
- Regular page links for everything else.
This inconsistency may be a usability issue in practice. Or, it could turn out that users do not notice the inconsistency as the nav still takes them where they want to go. In the case of the former, we could:
- If documentation writers decide these categories are not needed to support the structure of the support portal, these categories and their associated anchor links can probably be removed entirely.
- If categories and anchor links would be useful, we could split these out into a separate "Table of contents" style component that's distinct from either the sidebar or breadcrumb navigation. This component would exclusively be used to navigate within the same page.