31 Aug 2009 : Web navigation is about moving forward
I stumbled on this article by Gerry McGovern whilst doing some interface work, which was drowning fast under a sea of links.
"Your job is not to design for all possible directions someone might want to take. Your job is to understand the primary direction your most important customers are heading, and to remove obstacles in the way of them arriving at that destination."
Rather than overloading users with a page of links, you need to focus on the task they're trying to complete, and present them with navigation options that best enable them to do it. There's some other interesting articles and perspectives on gerrymcgovern.com too, its well worth a look.