Dagbladet.no Look Ma, no left navigation bar! Dagbladet's redesign simplified navigation.

Leading Norwegian news site Dagbladet.no made a major change to its front page yesterday: the left navigation bar disappeared and was replaced by a much slimmer top navigation bar. The left bar had 160 choices; the new top bar offers a mere 20.

Dagbladet's Jon R. Hammerfjeld said: "Almost no one used the old left bar. Only a couple of percent of total traffic went through that bar, and nearly all of that traffic went through a small number of choices."

Dagbladet will use the extra space to provide more news and less static content. Says Hammerfjeld: "There will be more lists that show what other readers appreciate, we will be showing more from the most popular debates, and there will be more user-generated content shown directly on the front page."

At the moment, the classic left bar is retained on Dagbladet's sub-sites. However, Dagbladet will eventually redesign the rest of the site to resemble its new front page.

I also hear that at lot of other Norwegian news sites will go through major redesigns within the next month. They all plan to lose the left bar. In this respect, a major number of Norwegian sites will look more like CNN and Yahoo News. Such a shift could maybe have been expected a little earlier, since Poynter's 2004 Eyetrack III study showed that people pay more attention to top bars (70.4 percent) than left bars (52.5) percent).