Ideas for a New Menu Layout

The aim is to produce an overall site layout that is powerful and yet easy to use. A simple design is needed aswell as smart features that help the user find it's way through our site.

To reach this aim, we could do the following:

• reduce the number of entries in the top-menu
• reduce the number of different menus
• eliminate elements that are not top-priority from the general layout
• cut additional elements from the header and move them to another spot on the page
• find new menu elements

affected build:

/build/rox + all others

all related tasks:

none yet

Menu Structure (after lupochen)

• Top-Menu: [Logo], My Account, Find Members, Plan your trip, Community, Help, [Search]
• left-menus: Show either just content-links (Shortcuts/Actionlinks) or also a thing called "Dashboard". You find important info there and the logout link - basically the stuff that's in the upper right corner of the page right now. To make it easier to get an overview, the Dashboard could be folded an unfolded via Javascript.
• upper-right menus: none anymore.

Menu & Page Design

• The top-menu is not in tab-design anymore. Instead we use "giant" buttons and put every element in the header in the same single row. Menu entries here will function and look more like categories that order the content of our site. Unlike tabs, the buttons don't make you think of hierarcical structures but of simple folders where a lot of diverse info is stored together on the same level. Hard to explain that better, but just have a look at the attached drafts below!
• a key element could also be the "notepad"-feature: On the upper right (like in the one draft!) we may put the yellow notepad that shows important information (like messages-info, online members and logout button). At the same time that you can follow the links of the automatic generated info in it, you can optionally create content yourself. Write a note down yourself that is important to keep while surfing through the site (such as numbers, addresses, names, etc.) and save and store it as long as you want. Look at the first draft below. You will understand why I find it a really great feature!

Questions

• One of the menu items appears with grey background. Does that mean this item is activated, or it is mouse-hovered? -- lemon-head
• I see great potential in the notepad idea. For instance, it could used to collect profile links, when planning a trip. The notebook would stay even if you go to another page, and thus help you to keep on track with your activity. (we need to discuss more about this!)