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

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

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)