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I have a website with a mega-menu. On the homepage we're looking for maximum exposure of the website categories (and we can spare the room) while the internal pages have plenty of content.

So I've been thinking about placing the mega-menu expanded on the homepage, acting more like an accordion, and collapsing it on the internal pages, acting like a standard mega-menu. The menu is not huge and not overloaded, it will probably be about 300px high and have up to 20 items in each category, usually closer to 10.

  1. Is it a good idea to have a header which is always expanded on the homepage, but collapses by default on the internal pages?

  2. I know I saw this behavior on a few websites, but I can't locate any right now. Have you seen this anywhere?

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  • Is there anything else on the home page? The home page is often used to showcase the scope of the site, and having the contents of the mega-menu on display there wouldn't be out of place.
    – Erics
    Dec 5, 2011 at 5:38
  • @Erics Yes, there's a main banner and some content boxes below.
    – Vitaly Mijiritsky
    Dec 5, 2011 at 9:55
  • Sorry, I know this is old now, but I just wanted to note that having a page element that behaves differently depending on which page of the site you're on is probably to be discouraged … I think users prefer and understand consistent behaviour. I hope you found a good solution :)
    – finiteattention
    Jan 24, 2013 at 11:40

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I would disagree with the mega menu being collapsed on the content pages since you might not know which landing page the users are landing on (it might be usually the home page) but users could land on a content page directly from a search engine's indexing results .

Instead of using an Accordion,how about using a vertical navbar where you are showing only a small subset of the items under each category say 2-3 and you allow users the option to expand and contract the section if needed.When the a specific section is expanded ( to show all 10-20 items) ,you could contract other sections.

The behavior would be accordion like but then you wont have to worry about how much of your initial fold content is hidden by your menu

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  • Thanks Mervin! It's an interesting solution. Unfortunately the horizontal navigation is a must, we can't spare the width.
    – Vitaly Mijiritsky
    Nov 30, 2011 at 19:17
  • Well this might not be the best solution but it might the screenshot given in this answer might give you some ideas ux.stackexchange.com/questions/1232/… My primary concern with an accordion is the huge number of submenu items you have and how much vertical ( and horizontal space ) it will occupy
    – Mervin
    Nov 30, 2011 at 21:38

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