Web Style Guide Design – Online Resource

The browse functionality of your site

“Once you have created your site in outline form, analyze its ability to support browsing by testing it interactively, both within the site development team and with small groups of real users. Efficient web site design is largely a matter of balancing the relation of major menu or home pages with individual content pages. The goal is to build a hierarchy of menus and content pages that feels natural to users and doesn’t mislead them or interfere with their use of the site.

Web sites with too shallow an information hierarchy depend on massive menu pages that can degenerate into a confusing laundry list of unrelated information. Menu schemes can also be too deep, burying information beneath too many layers of menus. Having to navigate through layers of nested menus before reaching real content is frustrating. ” – Extract from the website.

This is a good read, check it out here: http://www.webstyleguide.com/wsg3/index.html.