I'm planning a new website for my company and I have a problem in designing my menu/search menu.
I have a menu with 18 categories arranged horizontally. I also have favorites/saved criteria (eg categories / brands / stores) and I want to be able to quickly view the result of my favorite criteria.
More over, I'm looking at the same time how to mix 2 types of search + the free search field.
I thought of making a bar like this: http://www.heberger-image.fr/images/92781_search.jpeg.html
What do you think about this ?
Edit: This is a E-commerce website that brands pay to display their Products / Services (no advertising) ... That is why it seems difficult to display certain categories more than others...
Then, all categories can be grouped into families, for example with the following categories: Women Men Juniors Children BB
Finally, I suppose we can have 4-5 families + Favorites. It seems to be a "good" number.
Here we can, I suppose, all these categories together in the family (for example) "For You".
Maybe my question should rather be: The main menu (family menu) with a submenus that display categories (for example: http://www.heberger-image.fr/images/32292_menu.jpeg.html) is relevant in the case of e-commerce website? the user experience is good?