Primary navigation at the bottom?
I stumbled across this website earlier today and really liked their primary navigation:
http://www.designcommission.com/
Design Commission (DC) are a digital communications company based in Seattle, USA, and as such, you’d expect their site to be something of a showcase for their design and technical skills.
The site has a clean, crisp look and feel with intelligent use of white-space, but what i really like is the primary navigation links at the bottom of the screen.
www.designcommission.com
Its bright and bold (so not easily missed) and has a fixed location so you always know where its going to be.
Some neat z-indexing, coupled with a subtle shadow effect gives the impression that the navigation bar hovers over the content, and the addition of a simple cut-away triangle to denote your current location is a great touch, which compliments the element’s ‘hover’ appearance.
Simple triangular cut-away
Summary
By moving this navigation to the bottom of the screen DC have given more prominence to the page content, ensuring you see more information above the fold, while it’s fixed location and highly visible design means you never loose it…
Its a brave move and rejects the convention of having primary navigation either at the top of the page or down the left-hand side, but thanks to the way in which DC have implemented it I think it works really well.