we are currently in the middle of the redesign of our company website.
We have a company website which only contains informations that tells the visitor why our company is great and why he should create a free test account and customers have the option to login on the top right.
Now after a customer logs in, other parts are relevant (where he can actually work), so he will not need the navigation before the login.
Now we had a discussion on how to handle this and currently there are two ideas.
Idea 1: The navigation looks exactly the same but the navigation points are different after logging (horizontal navigation).
Idea 2: Since he wants to work after logging in, we present him a vertical navigation on the left (which he can hide so only icons are shown - if he wants).
In my personal opinion idea 2 has more clarity even though the first time a customer logs in he will see a different navigation (not horizontal anymore) - it won't be hard for him to understand that he's in the working part of the site now.
The only pro argument for the horizontal navigation i heard from my team right now is that it would be consistent to the navigation of the site before the login.
But that's my biggest con, since the user might expect the same content and might wonder why its gone.
I would like to hear your thoughts on this - we will definitely test this in the future but I still want to get some more views so I can talk with my team.
Thanks!