Good usability says you should use a menu on the left side of the screen and all the information on your website should only be a few clicks away. At the same time it must be easy for visitors to find their way on your website.
Good usability can be a huge effort and a real pain in the neck when you are designing an extensive website. There is only limited space in your menu structure and if the structure gets to complicated, your visitors get lost. And you may loose business.
New
On a number of (large) websites a new way of navigation has been introduced in the form of a Mega Drop-down menu. This means there is only a relatively simple menu in the top of the page and on mouse-over a comprehensive menu folds out. Making all the choices available at once.
Check out for example the Statoil or the Unilever website or see FoodNetwork to see how Mega Drop-down menu’s work.
Stay
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen is quite positive about the use of Mega Drop-down menu’s. Although his advise is to also keep Mega Drop-down menu’s as simple as possible. Because an overload of choices may reduce the advantages of these new menu’s.
It looks like the Mega Drop-down menu’s are there to stay. They might well replace the left menu as the new navigation convention for extensive websites.
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