Let me explain how the navigation came about.
There is the concept in the world of My and we can all thank Microsoft for that. So anything you want to do that is to do with you, you choose My. My stats, my queries, my account, my settings, my blog, etc, etc.
Then of course there are three main things that geocaching (in Australia) is about.
Caches, logs and swaggies.
You find and log caches.
You view logs.
You track swaggies.
Each one of them had a main menu item.
Thinking about work flow.
You want to "find a cache, in Victoria". Do you look for a Find menu or a Cache menu or a State menu.
You want to "log a cache, in Victoria". Do you look for a Log menu or a Cache menu or a State menu.
You want to "view a cache, in Victoria". Do you look for a View menu or a Cache menu or a State menu.
There are two common components to what you are doing. Things related to a cache or things related to your location.
As you can't spot a State menu, then anything to do with a cache itself, should be on the Cache menu.
Then at GCA, you can also look into Cachers. Stats about cachers, homepages, other contributions by cachers.
Similar concept to the one above. You want to find some stats about a Cacher, you select the Cachers tab. You want to see what logs cachers are liking, you can choose Logs or Cachers. 50/50 chance of getting it right. It could under either or both.
Tags are a little bit of a late comer to the party and they got their own tab because tags can be done on nearly anything. You can tag caches, blogs, etc, etc.
Community is a set of links off to community items like the forum and the gallery. Although the gallery could be under Caches or Logs as the gallery can be used for both. We could put it under all three or just one and we chose community, but that's a choice, not necessarily the BEST choice.
Of course the shop and help.
Now I don't deny that the more we add, the more the menu system could grow until it becomes a full screen of different choices. Some people think "I want to hide a cache" so I go to the Caches menu. Some people think "I want to make a log" so I go to the Logs menu. Others think "I want to hide MY cache" so I go to the My menu (and then have to work out it's on the account page). They might also think "I want to log a CACHE" so they go to the Caches menu, find the cache and log it. Some think "I want to write MY log" so they go to the My menu and can't find squat.
A good (better than ours) menu system should be intuitive, but as you can see above, I've just given 3 intuitive options for things and only one menu item is correct.
With all due respect to everyone, you don't think the way I do and I don't think the way you do and if we took a poll, you would probably find as many responses to "where should this menu item go" as you would respondents. Popular opinion is well and good, but then you are also excluding or making it difficult for people who DON'T think the way you do. So at the end of the day some will be 100% happy with the menu structure, some will be 100% unhappy (because they use IE6 which we don't support any more) and the remainder will be somewhere between unhappy and happy.
I'm sure someone like SamCarter would be more than happy to discuss normal distribution and confirm that you can't make all the people happy all the time.
So what we have is something that probably doesn't make anyone happy
Now, having said that, let me say this.
Of course, we are always open to suggestions that help people who know the site, people who are new to the site, people who understand hovering, people who don't (you have no idea how many people click Caches rather than hovering over it), people who think completely differently to you or I.
Screen real estate doesn't lend itself to too many more menu items.
There is real estate for one or two more, depending on their title which defines their width. That's on a standard XGA screen. The wide screen people have more room to play, but we can't crowd out the other users. Did you know / consider them? Also think about people who have a different skin at GCA and therefore also get a few more pictures in the navigation area. they will be impacted if we fill the screen width with shorter menus. Please also consider (but very much in the minority) that the site administrators have 2 additional menu items, one for site administration and user administration. The user administrators have just the one additional menu item.
Further to the main menus there are also the subtabs on the cacher page. I know of at least 1 person who continually suggests that we move those subtabs from a horizontal layout to a vertical layout. Of course, that then cuts into the available screen width. Not a problem on a wide screem, but on XGA, simply cuts too much valuable real estate away.
So, on to the challenge.
There are 22 "my" related things, not including additional things you can do on your settings page.
There are 16 "caches" related things including stats stuff.
There are 2 "swaggies" things, new and view.
There are 4 "logs" things to view logs including stats stuff.
There are 7 "cachers" things, again, including stats stuff.
There are 2 "tags" things.
There are 4 "community" things.
There is 1 "shop" thing.
There are 5 "help" things.
Some of the pages like settings and cacher page have additional pages you can navigate to.
On your settings page, there are 20 different things you can set or change.
On your cacher page, there are an additional 8 tabs and a total of 30 other pages you can head to.
So all up, there are 63 pages you can navigate to from the main navigation, plus 20 from your settings and 30 from your cacher page.
That's a total of 113 total pages worth of information you can get to.
Now if we just consider the main menus, 63 navigation pages, all of which you can visit from any page on the site (excepting the forums which we'll just completely ignore for now).
There are 9 main navigation tabs which mean each has a average of 7 items, but as you can see in the real world, only one has the actual average number. Creating more main menu items doesn't remove the "clutter", it just spreads it around. We can certainly move some of the stats stuff for example to a stats tab. However that still leaves the concept of "my" with the single largest list.
If were to do as some have suggested in the past, add some of the settings activities such as forum stars, guru status, etc, to the My tab, that simply increases the number of items under My.
Also consider that (as some have said), sub menus work when you know what menu item a sub menu item is contained in. To avoid that you promote all items to the main level of navigation. You then have a great whacking list of things to choose from. If you want to move some of these items off that whacking great list, then you can embed them in individual pages, like the settings page. The problem them becomes one of having to visit many pages to find the item you are looking for rather than just hover around in the sub menus.
I've written a lot here, and that's not to discourage opinion and proposals. It's just some background on why the menu system looks like what it does. If we weren't interested in discussion I would just have ignored everyone. But we DO care about you and any newcomers to the site so we are interested in hearing proposals.
However, let's also be practical. If you say "I want more tabs and fewer choices" and that's the extent of your comment, again, with all due respect, it will probably be ignored. WHAT new tabs? HOW will you find things with fewer choices. WHAT should be sent WHERE?
Consider there are 113 possible navigation options and a lot of people dislike clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking to get anywhere. I think the general axiom is if you can't find it in two clicks from ANYWHERE on the site, then it's a useless function and should be removed. So somehow, you need to squeeze 113 (or at least the 63 that are on the menus now), into a "no further than 2 clicks" navigation structure.
Please give us you comments, but also please make them something we can use and avoid "more, less, fewer, shorter, longer: without a some explanation so we can understand what's going on in your head.
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