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Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples And Good Practices

Compared to conventional navigation patterns tag clouds don't necessarily offer a more convenient and intuitive navigation. However, used properly, they can provide visitors with an instant illustration of the main topics, giving a very specific and precise orientation of the site's content. Since human beings tend to think in concepts and models, it's easier to get an idea of presented content if the main concepts are given straight away — in digestible pieces, and prioritized by their weight. In fact, the main advantage of tag clouds lies in their ability to highlight the most important or/and popular subjects dynamically which is not the case in conventional navigation menus.

Tag clouds offer a quite interesting approach for site navigation; although the technique is sometimes considered to be an "alternative", it shouldn't replace the "common" navigation but support it giving users additional clues about the content of the site. Due to their "cloudy" form the design of tag clouds sets them apart from other design elements on a page. And although designers don't really have that much choice in designing them, they still find their ways to break through the bounds of creativity and come up with some unusual approaches and solutions.

This article offers some selected examples of tag clouds, its shortcomings and also some suggestions for tagging data and links in a more profound and effective way.

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