Website Navigation Questions

[Marilyn Gairns]

We are going through a redesign and are now discussing the best options for navigation. Is anyone aware of any research available? If you are aware of any good site examples, please share them.
Flyouts
Drop-downs
Landing pages on the flyouts with all the choices of the flyout category listed

Thanks in advance for you feedback.

[Steve Williams]

Hi Marilyn,

I do not have any links to share but based on experience, drop-downs are both loved and hated. My recommendation is to, try not to overload the user with a ton of links but organize them based on how people use the site. If you have Google Analytics you can take a look at the site overlay and see link popularity. A good example of nice navigation is Yahoo! Sports. Notice how they have arrows for dropdowns links. http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl

Just some thoughts and good luck. If I find any articles I will pass them along.

-steve

[Marilyn Gairns]

Thanks Steve. We also agree that that if done correctly, fly-outs or drop-downs could be useful. We do use Google Analytics and are using this in the structure of our navigation. We have mixed opinions on the fly-outs. The main issue is going to be how well our CMS (Hannon Hill) handles this. Another site that some thought handled flyouts well was http://www.sony.com/ which indicated when there are secondary fly-outs, however it forces the user to click to view those. If you have any other thoughts, please let me know.
Thanks,
Marilyn

[Chris Scherer]

Marylin,
How goes the redesign? You are probably already past the menu issue by now but in case you aren't take a look at these for some inspiration. We're going through our redesign right now.

http://www.stthomas.edu/# (just the top navigation)
http://www.riosalado.edu/Pages/default.aspx (the quicklinks tab)
http://www.nd.edu/ (their popular sites and help center links)
http://new.oberlin.edu/ (their orange, blue, cyan sections)