I am working on an internal site for our company. I'm using bootstrap for styling, below is a small clip of our navbar. We've got the site name on the far left, and then different sections of the application are noted across the rest of the navbar, with section you're currently in marked as active. So in this example, you can see that we're on the Dashboard.
In our case, the Dashboard is also the home page for the site. Clicking on either the Site Name or the Dashboard links will take you to the dashboard.
I have had a few people question having two buttons do the same thing, but I view their presence as having a separate purpose from one another. The Site Name is there so you can see the name of the site from anywhere. The Dashboard link is there so that it can be highlighted when it's selected. If the Dashboard entry wasn't present, there wouldn't be an entry on the navbar that would make sense to be highlighted when you are on the dashboard. It wouldn't make sense to have the Site Name link.
Solutions I've considered:
- Removing the Dashboard link and highlight "Site Name" when on the Dashboard
- Remove the Site Name altogether and just have the sections of the app visible
- Remove the Dashboard link and don't highlight anything on the navigation bar
- Keep it as is and live with having duplicate links
I'd prefer to keep it how it is now, as I think this would be the most consistent with how the rest of the app works, and I think that some people might not find it intuitive that clicking on the logo takes them to the dashboard.