Web Development

As I looked at all of the sites and compared to them to the listed statistics, a couple of things popped out.

Just some observations/ In most of the sites only hyperlinks within a body of text were underlined.

So, if underlined hyperlinks "are ingrained in the visitor's expectations," it appears that many designers are not meeting those expectations within the site as a whole.

And the "6 or fewer navigation rule" was only adhered to in the broadest sense. Usually applied to a top menu bar even though the sites had navigational links scattered throughout, under various headings. It seems to depend on what you define as a "navigation element."

Bob

I think the attribution that left sidebars "impede reading" and that right sidebars may be a stylistic misses the mark.

Most likely you are correct that designers are putting body text and content structurally above the navigation. Assuming these designers have the technical savvy to optimize their pages for search engines, this only makes sense. I think most search engines give more weight to keywords that appear "higher" on the page.