Planning and Mapping Navigation
Before you begin to build your menu system, you should outline the content of the Flash movie, web site, or whatever particular type of production you are creating. From that content, you should come up with categories that best describe the content. These categories become your main menu items. Depending on the extent of your content, you may need to develop sub-categories, and in some cases, the sub-categories may have sub-categories themselves.
In this case I’ve developed six (6) main categories, three (3) of which have sub-categories, and one sub-category with 4 additional sub-categories. In total, there are twenty-seven (27) categories and sub-categories, or, if you like, twenty-seven (27) items, links, or sections.
As you might imagine, presenting twenty-seven (27) links to users is a challenge as you will want each item to be easily and quickly accessible. The menu system described above makes each item quickly accessible, in a manner familiar to most computer users, and intuitive to those with little or no computer experience. Furthermore, it takes up very little screen space, which frees you, the designer. Before I begin to build the menu system, I always make a flowchart and diagram detailing each category and any sub-categories. Each category and sub-category shapes the structure of the menu system.


The categories and sub-categories of the site become the structure of the menu system.