I am designing a knowledge center site for a large consumer company. Currently there are more than 800 pages on the site that are all different. In order to navigate the site, we decided to go with drop down menus that had up to three layers. However, the associates of this company are limited to a screen resolution of 900x1024 and wouldn't be able to view all the pages in the menu because they would go off the screen to the right. Any suggestions on a better navigation plan?
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People likely don't want to navigate 800 pages. My guess is they want to search for something specific. I'd maybe focus on the search angle more than navigation angle.– DA01Jan 23, 2013 at 15:55
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Jakob Nielsen says "mega-menus" work well for large sites nngroup.com/articles/mega-menus-work-well– UrbycozJan 23, 2013 at 16:43
2 Answers
Without knowing any specific details I may suggest the following:
Add search with autocompletion
Group pages somehow and let user go deeper into the hierarchy while narrowing down the context.
You may use tagging or labeling for reducing number of items. Tags or labels may be represented as a list or as a tag cloud.
You might also want to have a look at elastic lists:
New York Times Archive search http://moritz.stefaner.eu/projects/elastic-lists/NYT/
Nobel prize search http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/elastic_lists/