Menu - help or advice please

Hi folks,

I work in Local Government and have an internal website (I used frontpage). Its a very basic website with a static menu on a shared border.

I now am going to re-design the website (using dreamweaver) and want to update the whole thing, however I have discovered that the number of pages has grown monstrously so I wanted a more dynamic and userfriendly menu system with the ability to have further levels underneath when you click on a particular page.

Therefore, could someone offer me some advice based on my admittedly limited experience. I can't really use anything from Javascript.com etc because I'm not really sure of the rules regarding all that!! I need something thats easy to implement and also easy to update and make look the same as the other stuff. As an example, my menu needs to look something like the one on this page <http://www.bradford.gov.uk/scrutiny/index.asp > but a lot more interactive.

Thanks

Matt

a more dynamic and userfriendly menu
It should be noted that those two things don't necessarily combine well all the time... :o

I haven't got a chance to look at the Bradford page, but any menu should reflect the structure of the information presented in a way most visitors would expect. It's this last aspect that's often hardest to achieve.

Altough there's a lot of talk about menus lately -some voices declare them next to useless altogether, a visitor should be able to find what he/she is looking for in as few clicks as possible, and every click that is required needs to clearly lead towards the desired end result.

If there are multiple levels recognisable in the menu structure, a dynamic / drop-down style menu is one option; they don't work well for all people, though. Another approach, in line with the click-towards-the-goal idea, would be to refine the menu options from broad to specific in subsequent levels, and only show the items for that level, and the parent item -although research has shown that many visitors mainly use the "Back" button to navigate back up the structure.

A peek at the intended menu structure could help to say anything more conclusive; if you already decided for a dynamic menu system, do a search for "drop down menu" as this is what they're commonly known as.