A little while ago it hit us that our website was almost 3 years old. It had aged well, but the polish was starting to come off, and it grew to the point where its navigation was no longer adequate. It was time for a complete re-vamp.

While brainstorming the new website and its navigation structure, we quickly came to the subject of ribbon - a new user interface element introduced by Microsoft Office 2007. We felt that it worked really well in desktop applications, but at that point we had never seen a website driven by it. We decided to give this idea a try and allocated some resources to research it.

The problem with getting website navigation wrong is that it essentially makes your entire site useless. If people are not able to find what they are looking for, they simply won't stick around. Trying to do something new and unusual is asking for trouble and should be heavily scrutinized - it would have to be extremely intuitive and well executed in order to even begin to compete against solutions that people have previous experience with.

It was interesting to observe the stages we went through while trying to design the ComponentArt.com ribbon. We went from initial excitement to anxiety, to denial and despair. :) After a couple of weeks of building various mock-ups we came to the conclusion that it was simply not going to work. I was actually trailing behind our website developers by about one week: at the time I was excited they had already reached the denial phase. But by the time I came around and started having doubts about using the ribbon for website navigation, the guys came back to me and said: "No, wait! It's going to work! Check out these wireframes... "

We then spent many hours populating the ribbon with tabs, groups, items; giving special attention to the overall hierarchy as well as carefully crafting each individual title, label, description. We wanted our navigation to have a no-nonsense vibe to it, so we stayed away from cute or catchy terms and phrases.

We are quite happy with the final result. However, our website visitors are the ones who have the final say on whether this experiment was a success. What do you think, does it work?