I agree about designing for browsing scenarios: categorising content is perhaps more useful to site designers than visitors.

I’m guessing the main scenarios are:

· visitor has clicked on a link to a story and reads away
· visitor has come via a search engine — it’s probably the right page but they may need some help finding the exact page they need
· visitor knows the story is on the site and enters a search term (requires a really good site search engine)
· visitor is interested in a subject and enters a search term (ditto)
· visitor just wants to browse the news (requires a well laid out home page)
· visitor wants to read stuff from a particular section (football, for example); top level nav is important

So having a really good search engine and providing relevant contextual links is perhaps the most important thing (or just making sure inline links are relevant and well labelled). I like the idea of categorising content around stories rather than newspaper sections.

Now admittedly there are people who have reasons/needs to browse rather than search but I do think we’re all still a bit hung up on trying to provide a comprehensive, fair top-level navigation that can be used to find *all* content. That route usually results in either nav bloat or cryptic nav. Either way, underused nav.

I think we need to get better at using this space on websites to just provide a solution to key browsing scenarios and use other tools (search, homepage space, cross-content navigation) to support others.

(still not sure about business though

Similarly, most newspapers — even red tops — have some sort of Business section which serves a purpose beyond reporting business news; it may list prices or provide advice, so I think a discrete section is justifiable.

I wonder how often a newspaper’s navigation menu is actually used? And what about stories that could be placed in more than one category?

I don’t know if this is still true but it certainly used to be the case that a really significant chunk of the readers of the Guardian website weren’t readers of the newspaper and never had been…so G2 could be a bit tricky as an option.

What’s your thinking for keeping business as a top-level option? If we’re radically simplifying then why doesn’t that go under news too? Why’s business special?

your version would require more clicks from the user to get to the relevant pages/articles

Yes, it would. The challenge is to make the path to that content as clear as possible; that’s why I’ve used the print version of the paper as a basis for the site structure: it’s logical and (Guardian) readers will be familiar with it.

The alternative is to place 50+ links on the page and hope that the reader is willing to scan for content.

More money doesn’t necessarily make it better.

How is my version ‘worse’?

Ta,

Leon

Your version completely ignores so many of the excellent features the guardian site employs to make their site accessible, usable and easily-navigated through. And there is soooo much content on the guardian site, your version would require more clicks from the user to get to the relevant pages/articles.

Pretty much everything you’ve done is worse. The design and development of the guardian was a multi-million pound job given to one of the top media agencies in the world, so much thought and planning went into the header and site structure. I don’t think you should try and ‘improve’ on that.