Background
On Mar 15, 2023, the Verso Core team launched a new and easier way for brands to view and manage their site’s primary links (top navigation bars). Brand product and engineering stakeholders are now able to make changes to their sites menu bars without engineering involvement and code changes, and they can preview their changes across their production and staging brand sites. This will greatly simplify and speed up top navigation changes that occur periodically. Primary links editing in Verso Setting is available now in Verso Settings and can be accessed by stakeholders with verso:edit permissions in Interfaces.
Why did we do this?
Top navigation is a part of every brand site and appears on virtually all pages. As such, it’s also the most configured/changed feature in Verso. Brands make changes to their site navigations throughout the year due to seasonal changes in channels, time-bound events like Amazon Prime Day or the Met Gala, and/or editorial decisions to shift priority to different channels and want their menu bar to reflect the same.
Historically, these sorts of changes to the top navigation have been an opaque process and have required engineering involvement to add and remove links in a routine manner. During our user research, we identified that improving the process of making these changes would greatly speed up brand workflows and make it easier for brands to better understand their own site navigation.
As a part of this work, we also undertook standardizing and streamlining the navigation “schema” which also included brands that have what’s known as MegaMenu, a drawer in the top navigation that reveals groupings of nested links (i.e. Recipes > Drinks > Spirits > Tequila). This also allows other brands to adopt the MegaMenu structure and set up their data in a quick and easy way. With multiple brands and cluster teams focusing on harmonization this year and beyond, we determined this feature to be important as a number of brands are planning on adopting and standardizing their top navigations to include MegaMenu in the coming months.